
Ask HN: Hardware support for garbage collection by mainstream CPUs? - dgudkov
Garbage collection can be viewed as a software emulation of infinite computer memory. Besides obvious technical complexity, are there any theoretical&#x2F;practical reasons why mainstream CPUs don&#x27;t do hardware garbage collection?
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wmf
This isn't a direct answer, but when hardware doesn't provide an "obviously
useful" feature the reason is often because it wouldn't be faster.
[http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-
challenge.html](http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html)
[http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-
up.html](http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html)

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hitr
I had this crazy idea once! . "Since JVM,CLR and the likes are very
popular,why not have hardware accelerated GC or a hardware which can execute
java bytecode or MSIL ". May be Microsoft or Oracle should build one as they
are heavily invested in GC languages :).

Turns out there are some research and implementaion on this already

[https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/hamm_isca09.pdf](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/hamm_isca09.pdf)

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=554101...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5541011&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5541011)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle)

A possible answer why this did not go mainstream
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051947)

