First Post

I figured that I would introduce myself and this blog before filling it with content.

I am a CS student at RIT in my third year here. I've got a light background in backend web development, with a fair amount of experience in building distributed/concurrent systems. My focuses tend to be on functional programming, and on compiler implementation strategies. I've worked here as a student lab instructor for a semester and I've spent 7 months on co-op at EnerNOC, the place where I am now working part-time. 

This blog is my journal of my independent study in garbage collection. I'll be working under Professor Fluet; we hope to cover the classic garbage collection handbook and to create a number of small implementations of collectors around the racket dialect of scheme. I hope to culminate the class with useful contributions to Mlton's garbage collector, which Professor Fluet maintains.

I will be using this blog to describe the readings and to document the experience of the class. Our custom syllabus for the course is below:

Tentative Garbage Collection Independent Study Syllabus

Week	Material
1	Readings of Garbage Collection Handbook up through Chapter 4.
2	Readings of Garbage Collection Handbook up through Chapter 8.
3	Begin work on simple mark-sweep GC in Racket, read selected papers
4	Deliver simple mark-sweep GC
5	Readings of Garbage Collection Handbook up through Chapter 12.
6	Begin work on generational GC in Racket, read selected papers.
7	Readings of Garbage Collection Handbook up through Chapter 17.
8	Deliver generational GC, readings of GC Handbook up through Chapter 19.
9	Literate-programming style analysis of the garbage collector of a non-trivial programming language.
10	Selected readings and analysis of mlton. Discussion of potential improvements.
11	Delivery of “debugging” application for mlton GC. Possibly a graphviz output of the generations.
12	Beginning of Mlton Enhancement Project.
13-15	Selected readings, collaboration on MEP.
16	Delivery of MEP

Note: All deliverables are assumed to be due by the end of the week noted. All readings will be demonstrated by competence in discussion of the reading with the professor during that week’s hours.

Resources:

Racket GC: http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay/courses/2012/fall/330/course/gc.html

GC Handbook: http://gchandbook.org/contents.html