Patrick Dussud: Garbage Collection - Past, Present and Future

Posted By: Charles | Jul 27th, 2007 @ 12:05 PM

I finally got a chance to sit down and talk to Patrick Dussud, one of the CLR founders and chief architect of the .NET Garbage Collector, or GC, as developers call it. I wanted to learn about what a GC is, how it works, why it does what it does, how it will evolve, Patrick's history in the industry, and, of course, get some Niner GC questions answered by the master of GC himself. I'd say all of this was accomplished and then some.

Patrick is a Distinguised Engineer and has been working on automatic object lifetime management systems for many years (that's one way to think about a GC - automatic object lifetime manager). Ever wonder what happens to running .NET code when a garbage collection occurs? Why did Patrick decide to allow programmers to invoke a garbage collection programmatically? How does the GC accurately keep track of all objects lifetime states and determine what lives and what dies when it's time to pick up the garbage?

If you're curious about the history of the CLR's GC, how it works, why it's designed the way it is, how it will evolve and want to meet the man behind it all, well, this interview is for you! Sit back, relax, grab some popcorn and learn.

Enjoy!

Tags: CLR, Garbage Collector, MS Personalities

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littleguru

Yipee. Finally up Smiley

Thanks to everybody involved in the video. I'm going to watch this asap!

Cyonix

That was great, thanks guys.

JohnnyAwesome

They wrote J Script in the time-span of several weekends? And he wrote that in Lisp and then rolled a C translator from scratch?

There is a reason why I could not work at Redmond and that just about summarizes it.

Escamillo

JohnnyAwesome wrote:

They wrote J Script in the time-span of several weekends? And he wrote that in Lisp and then rolled a C translator from scratch?

There is a reason why I could not work at Redmond and that just about summarizes it.

His mentioning that part of his Lisp background is from working on the TI Explorer (TI's lisp machine workstation) at Texas Instruments brings back some memories. My university had a couple of those TI Explorer lisp machines. I never got to do any real work on them, but I loved playing with them. They seemed to be a lot more polished than the Symbolics lisp machines we had. Smiley

JChung2006

JohnnyAwesome wrote:

They wrote J Script in the time-span of several weekends? And he wrote that in Lisp and then rolled a C translator from scratch?

There is a reason why I could not work at Redmond and that just about summarizes it.

It's not that difficult, especially if you've done it before, like most people would have in any decent computer science graduate program.

evildictaitor

JChung2006 wrote:

JohnnyAwesome wrote:They wrote J Script in the time-span of several weekends? And he wrote that in Lisp and then rolled a C translator from scratch?

There is a reason why I could not work at Redmond and that just about summarizes it.

It's not that difficult, especially if you've done it before, like most people would have in any decent computer science graduate program.

Bearing in mind that Computer Science graduate programs didn't exist fifteen years ago, and were a one-year extention of a maths or engineering course.

And now I feel old.

Anyway, GC is one of the problems that I've worked on quite a bit, and they really are facinating. Dussud's right tho. A bad GC makes everything horrible, and a good GC can hide a multitude of sins in a badly written application.

Congrads to Dussud on the CLR GC, it's certainly one of the most impressive out there and is a significant reason as to why managed code doesn't experience the loss of power that most people expected it to.

It's probably not an overstatement to say that his work is contributory to the MSR Singularity's surprisingly good CPU performance review earlier this year, despite expectations that it would be catastrophically bad. Managed code is great because we have guys like Patrick on board.

littleguru

evildictaitor wrote:

Managed code is great because we have guys like Patrick on board.

So true.

Sad that the question about the differences between the different GCs - like Server, Client, Compact Framework - wasn't asked...

Charles

littleguru wrote:

evildictaitor wrote: Managed code is great because we have guys like Patrick on board.

So true.

Sad that the question about the differences between the different GCs - like Server, Client, Compact Framework - wasn't asked...

We didn't have time to cover all the questions. Patrick focused on the ones he found most interesting that haven't been talked/written about before or exhaustively.

littleguru

Charles wrote:

littleguru wrote:

evildictaitor wrote: Managed code is great because we have guys like Patrick on board.

So true.

Sad that the question about the differences between the different GCs - like Server, Client, Compact Framework - wasn't asked...

We didn't have time to cover all the questions. Patrick focused on the ones he found most interesting that haven't been talked/written about before or exhaustively.

Yeah. It's ok. Could you point me to the blog that is mentioned when he talks about the woman that's developing the GC? Thanks!