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pcwalton's profile
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
@pcwalton

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Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
pcwalton.github.io
Joined November 2009

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    1. Sebastian Sylvan‏ @ssylvan 26 Mar 2018
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      Sebastian Sylvan Retweeted Sebastian Sylvan

      Well, reading up more on the Unity Burst compiler and it looks like this is exactly what they're doing. Non-GC subset of C#.. So structs only, data stored mostly within the "Job" and on the stack (and presumably some "engine data" you can access safely (but not own or delete)?)https://twitter.com/ssylvan/status/976233614349225984 …

      Sebastian Sylvan added,

      Sebastian Sylvan @ssylvan
      I would kinda want a non-GC alternative for game code though. Doesn't have to be general purpose language since you can always drop back to C# (e.g. maybe you can't do general allocations on the heap, only component and stack-owned allocs?)... Or just give me a C++ game API :)
      Show this thread
      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
    2. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @ssylvan

      Sounds a lot like what we tried with early Rust. It didn’t scale at all… but maybe for short snippets of code it’s OK.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    3. Sebastian Sylvan‏ @ssylvan 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @pcwalton

      I think it could work if all of the "data organization" stuff happens outside of the scripting code. So the "job" sees some input/output data buffers and can have some "owned" data structures embedded in the job. Everything else happens outside of the job.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    4. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @ssylvan

      I’m not convinced GC is an issue for that kind of code even in a full-GC language. This is what a good generational GC will excel at… It’ll be an interesting experiment.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    5. Sebastian Sylvan‏ @ssylvan 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @pcwalton

      It's certainly a problem in both Unity and UE4 right now... I tend to agree that it's probably possible to make a GC that works better for games, but IMO step 0 is to reduce the amount of garbage by at least 10x compared to C# "style" allocation patterns.

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
    6. Sebastian Sylvan‏ @ssylvan 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @ssylvan @pcwalton

      The bigger problem is that I'm not convinced game code (at least 99% of it) _needs_ GC. It may be convenient, but the allocation patterns tend to be fairly explicit already (a health pickup doesn't get garbage collected, it gets explicitly destroyed when you grab it, etc.).

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    7. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @ssylvan

      I would certainly agree with that—it’s why Rust is a good language for game/graphics development after all :) But the hard part is how to make an ergonomic and memory-safe environment that takes advantage of that fact. I’m not convinced that an easy solution exists.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    8. Alexandre Mutel‏ @xoofx 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @pcwalton @ssylvan

      For Unity, problem is being solved with a subset non-GC C# lang and a Job system that controls what data can be safely scheduled. It works pretty well for an ECS workflow, but it would not be practical outside this controlled environment or if you even want to use "just" a string

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    9. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @xoofx @ssylvan

      I kind of wonder whether anyone has actually tried putting a zero-latency GC into practice in games. If pauses are so bad you’re willing to sacrifice any amount of throughput to eliminate them, the GC literature has you covered…

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 26 Mar 2018
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      Replying to @pcwalton @xoofx @ssylvan

      Write a concurrent mark/sweep GC that uses read and write barriers to maintain the tri-color invariant, and have no compaction or stop the world other than to rebalance TLABs (like jemalloc). Bad throughput, but shouldn’t have any pauses…

      1:44 PM - 26 Mar 2018 from South Beach, San Francisco
      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        1. Alexandre Mutel‏ @xoofx 26 Mar 2018
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          Replying to @pcwalton @ssylvan

          For Unity, it's a mix of JIT/GC perf due to Mono but a zero GC is not the graal. The critical part is to efficiently work in batch, in //, safely, with proper data layout maximizing cache coherency + noalias aware codegen: that's where burst & the job system work very well here

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