JavaScript:ActionMonkey:Stage 0 Whiteboard

Up: JavaScript:ActionMonkey.

.plan

- Get at least sketchy answers to most of the questions below.

- Do a sprint with Mardak and Brendan (if he's available) to reimplement jsgc.c using MMgc. Call it jsgc.cpp.

- Debug and grow wise.

General issues

If there's anywhere a GCThing has pointers to non-GC-managed memory that contains pointers back into GC-managed memory, we have a problem. Exact GC lets you do that (you know how to traverse the non-GC-managed memory). MMgc doesn't.

I don't know that SpiderMonkey does this anywhere. If it does, one fix is to change those data structures to live in GC-managed memory. So the fix itself is easy: finding the offenders is the interesting bit.

Prep work

Things that should probably happen pre-sprint:

• A few places are poking the runtime->gcPoke field directly. I think these should be changed to use the GC_POKE macro.
  • Probably not necessary if gcPoke, which is only read from js_GC, becomes ignored. See GC_POKE below.

• Administrivia: merge latest CVS into mozilla-central, then into actionmonkey; prepare Makefile and a dummy jsgc.cpp for the festivities.

Specific jsgc.h APIs

What follows is a dump of everything exposed through jsgc.h. Each item is rated * (one star, an easy exercise); ** (two stars, fun little puzzle); *** (three stars, hmmmm, that's interesting). The ratings are jorendorff's guesses though. The wildest, least-educated guesses are marked with ?.

• GCX_OBJECT ... GCF_MUTABLE, js_GetGCThingFlags - **
  • Where do we put these flags? They are no longer needed for the GC itself, but non-GC-related functionality has been piggybacked on these flags, so we can't just get rid of them. GCF_MARK is not used outside the garbage collector, but GCF_MUTABLE, GCF_LOCK, and GCF_SYSTEM (and maybe the type bits) are used (and not just read access--there's code outside jsgc.c that actually twiddles these bits).
  • Try putting them in the revised JSObject, JSString, etc. data structures that subclass the MMgc GCObject types. /be
  • We can overallocate by a byte and put the flags bits alongside the object itself. That single byte costs us 8 bytes... but actually I'm leaning toward doing this, for now, silly as it is. It lets us leave the existing API alone, macros and all. We'll worry about all sorts of speed/space concerns in the next round.
  • Right, essentially the same my suggestion above. /be
  • GCF_LOCK flag is used to pin NaN, +-inf, and "" empty string, so perhaps create a GCRoot to point to these items. See js_LockGCThing below.

• js_GetGCStringRuntime - *
  • GC::GetGC(const void *), then (a) decrement by some offset; or (b) just give the GC a pointer back to the context or runtime (that is, make a subclass of MMgc::GC that contains a pointer back to the JSContext, and use that).
  • There's only one JSRuntime in Firefox and other Gecko apps (used by XPConnect), so just make a singleton pointer associated with the GC instance. /be

• GC_POKE - *
  • No-op for now. Its effect is read only by js_GC currently so since that function is gutted you can gut this use of rt->gcPoke. /be
  • The MMgc equivalent is DWB() and its ilk. In incremental mode, these are required. In non-incremental mode, they're only necessary if a finalizer might cause an object to become reachable. This is a creepy thing to do anyway; if we have only well-behaved finalizers, we have nothing to worry about. -jto

• js_ChangeExternalStringFinalizer - *
  • External strings can be implemented by a JSExternalString class with a destructor that consults the table of string finalizers.
  • Emulate this on top of MMgc using a virtual method on JSString, which inherits from GCFinalizedObject. /be

• js_InitGC ... js_MapGCRoots - *
  • Core features of MMgc. There's no API in MMgc for enumerating roots, but we can either cheat (via #define private protected) or keep our own list outside of MMgc. Anyway--not hard.
  • Defer for now. /be

• JSPtrTable, js_RegisterCloseableIterator, JSGCCloseState, js_RegisterGenerator, js_RunCloseHooks - *
  • These will become no-ops. All this has to do with iterator and generator cleanup, but these hooks are going away. See bug 380469. (Related bug: bug 349272.)
  • No-op'ing should not cause leaks since (AFAIK) no chrome JS uses generators. /be

• JSGCThing - **
  • This can probably go away. It's mentioned outside jsgc.c in two places: (a) in the context of weakRoots.newborn, which I assume we'll keep, since the newborn guarantee is JSAPI-visible; and (b) in the declaration of JSContext, where they won't be needed anymore.
  • Both JSGCThing and cx->weakRoots should be removed. The latter should not be necessary given conservative stack scanning. /be

• GC_NBYTES_MAX, GC_NUM_FREELISTS, GC_FREELIST_NBYTES, GC_FREELIST_INDEX - *
  • These can just go away.

• js_NewGCThing - *
  • The only thing to worry about is the flags.

• js_LockGCThing, js_LockGCThingRT, js_UnlockGCThingRT - ** ?
  • I need to read this code.
  • This is the pinning API. Can be reimplemented on top of MMgc rooting. /be
  • "make one big root for everything you can keep track of - one GCRoot for each runtime." Reuse the "constants/pinning" GCRoot for anything else that needs locking?

• js_IsAboutToBeFinalized - *
  • We'll have to lay the hack on pretty thick to get this without modifying MMgc source code, but it can be done.
  • or modify MMgc -- that can be done too in this stage 0 work I think. /be

• IS_GC_MARKING_TRACER - * ?
  • This isn't documented anywhere, but it can probably just always return false.

• JSTRACE_FUNCTION ... JSTRACE_XML - * ?
  • The tracing API uses these. I think this will be unaffected; not positive.

• JS_IS_VALID_TRACE_KIND - *
  • Unaffected.

• js_CallValueTracerIfGCThing - *
  • Likely unaffected.

• js_TraceStackFrame, js_TraceRuntime, js_TraceContext - *
  • Probably unaffected.

• JSGCInvocationKind, GC_NORMAL, GC_LAST_CONTEXT, GC_LAST_DITCH, js_GC - ** ?
  • The GC "invocation kinds" need to be maintained somehow. That will require some study.
  • If MMgc runs only a global mark and sweep in this stage 0 of ActionMonkey, then we can run out of memory (perhaps only after paging to death), and we do need to GC everything on last context destruction. So these should be kept as arguments to js_GC, and possibly even used in its new MMgc-based implementation. /be

• js_UpdateMallocCounter - * ?
  • I would say "unaffected" except that our use of JS_malloc() might end up decreasing so much as to defeat the purpose of this. So maybe we need a new heuristic for JS_MaybeGC(). The only other place gcMallocBytes is directly used is for jsscope.c for changing scope (it allocates space with calloc but treats it as a malloc). Ask Brendan.
  • This stage 0 work should not reduce the number of JS_malloc calls (jsgc.c does not call JS_malloc). What reduction were you expecting? /be

• JS_GCMETER, JSGCStats, js_DumpGCStats - *
  • Gone.

• JSGCArenaList - *
  • Gone.

• JSWeakRoots, JS_CLEAR_WEAK_ROOTS - *
  • Unaffected.
  • These should be removed. /be