wingo pushed a commit to branch wip-whippet
in repository guile.
commit 1f9369c403025866e2369cab81982b07cb1d82a9
Author: Andy Wingo <wi...@igalia.com>
AuthorDate: Thu Aug 7 22:31:14 2025 +0200
Update README.md
---
README.md | 27 ++++++++++++++++-----------
1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 9ef9e3cc9..dd325628a 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
# Whippet Garbage Collector
This repository is for development of Whippet, a new garbage collector
-implementation, eventually for use in [Guile
+implementation, initially targetted for use in [Guile
Scheme](https://gnu.org/s/guile).
Whippet is an embed-only C library, designed to be copied into a
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ See the [documentation](./doc/README.md).
- Conservative heap tracing (optionally with `mmc`, always with `bdw`)
- Parallel tracing (except `semi`)
- Parallel mutators (except `semi`)
- - Inline allocation / write barrier fast paths (supporting JIT)
+ - Inline allocation / write barrier / safepoint fast paths (supporting JIT)
- One unified API with no-overhead abstraction: switch collectors when
you like
- Three policies for sizing heaps: fixed, proportional to live size, and
@@ -44,16 +44,21 @@ See the [documentation](./doc/README.md).
## Status and roadmap
-As of January 2025, Whippet is good to go! Of course there will surely
-be new features to build as Whippet gets integrated it into language
-run-times, but the basics are there.
+As of August 2025, Whippet is feature-complete, in the sense that it is
+ready to replace [Guile](https://gnu.org/s/guile)'s use of the
+Boehm-Demers-Weiser collector; see the [`wip-whippet` integration
+branch](https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/tree/?h=wip-whippet).
+We hope to incrementally merge this branch of Guile over to the main
+Guile branch over the next months.
-The next phase on the roadmap is support for tracing, and
-some performance noodling.
+In the future, Whippet's internal collectors need to add support for
+MacOS and Windows, to fix some usage of the C11 atomics API that clang
+doesn't like, to test on AArch64, and
-Once that is done, the big task is integrating Whippet into the [Guile
-Scheme](https://gnu.org/s/guile) language run-time, replacing BDW-GC.
-Fingers crossed!
+There are all kinds of new collector designs that it would be fun to
+experiment with, but we are mostly in a getting-into-production phase at
+the moment. Feel very free to fork the repo to try out any ideas you
+might have!
## About the name
@@ -65,7 +70,7 @@ property.
## License
```
-Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Andy Wingo
+Copyright (c) 2022-2025 Andy Wingo
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
