Re: Visualizing clumps

At 2011-11-17 23:36:38+0000, "Jon Harrop" writes:

> These are immutable singly-linked lists with sharing. So several different
> list nodes (cons cells) can refer to the same tail but each list node can
> only refer to zero or one other lists. For example, a "star" with three legs
> might signify the deaths of the three different lists [2;1], [3;1] and [4;
> 1] that all shared the same physical tail list [1].

Every node is a cons cell? OK. Would you predict star-shaped clumps,
based on the algorithm?

> > Common benchmarks are all terrible for assessing GCs.  Run a real program.
> 
> Yes, I thought that might be the case. :-)
> 
> > When I was working on MLWorks, I always used to use one phase of our
> > overnight build (i.e. our compiler compiling the whole system including
> itself)
> > which as I recall allocated about 10 GB.  I would expect that to produce
> some
> > much larger and more interesting clumps.
> 
> I'll do so if I can find the time but my objective was more to inspire than
> to research thoroughly. Hopefully someone else is in a better position than
> I to generate data from real programs.

Understood.  I'm very out-of-date here; does PolyML (or GHC) build via
a bootstrap, which could be used as a GC benchmark?

Nick B