📝§ Garbage collection

Shadow stack—can be used to track GC roots

• Servo uses Rust lints to ensure all GC pointers are rooted

  • Servo’s GC types are only safe because GC is conservative

mprotect to implement a write barrier (GC)

A generational GC can skip scanning an old generation if it is known to not contain references to newer generations

• If objects are immutable, older memory can never point to the newly-allocated memory

Conservative GC can relocate objects if their pointer does not occur on stack

GC only helps with memory but not other resources

Debugging tips

• Using mprotect none to catch GC bugs

• Run GC as often as possible to test it and catch bugs