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Great learning project, I'm glad the author is having fun. Implementing a VM from scratch is a blast, and I have learned so much in the past doing that kind of thing.

If they're interested in bolting on a GC, it couldn't hurt to look at MMtk. (https://www.mmtk.io/) Some high quality collection algorithms, written to be pluggable to various VMs, and written in Rust.

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Note that MMTK is x86 only. I was going to use it for a toy project but I have a Mac.

That's a bummer -- I guess I never noticed that, when I played with it before it was on an M1 Mac, but compiled into an x86 Julia executable & running through Rosetta (which surprisingly did not suck).

Haven't read, but I bet it's likely related to expectations around the x86_64 memory model & atomics. In the long run I see no reason why it couldn't be made portable, but I imagine the authors efforts are elsewhere for now.

Uh, first time hearing mmtk. Thanks for the link!

I only became aware of it because a former employer (RelationalAI) was heavily interested in replacing Julia's GC with it (for some workloads): https://pretalx.com/juliacon2023/talk/BMBEGY/

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