Adding Ref-Counting to Rotor

Microsoft has granted Sells Brothers, Inc. a research grant to add ref-counting to Rotor and to study the performance effects. The proposal that lead to that grant is available here. There's been a lot of speculation about just how we're planning to add ref-counting to Rotor. Here are the highlights:

• It's not just "me," it's "we." I've already have very useful input from several folks, including Jason Whittington, Ted Neward, Ian Griffiths, Serge Lidin, Craig Andera and Bill Conroy. Also, Chris Tavares will be spending most of July doing the actual implementation. If anyone else wants to dig in, feel free! I'm happy for the help and anyone that provides insight will get credit.
   
• The goal of adding ref-counting to Rotor is to measure the performance effects of a deterministic finalization-like model that we gave up when moving from COM/C++/VB6 to .NET. I say "DF-like" because we're not getting DF, because the price of determinism is that sometimes an object is never finalized, e.g. cycles. We can do better.
   
• We will not be replacing the existing GC's ref-tracking. It does a fabulous job managing memory and managing cycles and we won't touch that.
   
• The ref-counting implementation's sole job will be to call an object's finalizer ASAP. Note that this is in no way "deterministic." Plain ref-counting is deterministic in that it calls an object's finalizer just as soon as there were no more outstanding object references. Cycles meant that this would never happen (deterministically). A hybrid ref-counting/ref-tracking system improves "never" to "eventually" in the case of a cycle and maintains the ref-counting's guarantee for ASAP in their absence.
   
• Even objects that don't have finalizers will need ref-counts, as they maintain references to objects that have finalizers (and so on).
   
• Value types will not need reference counts, but when they go out of scope, there will need to be a Release on any object references the value objects contain.
   
• When the GC kicks in and finally breaks a cycle, it would be nice to release all objects held by the cyclic objects so that they could return to normal ref-counting determinism. However, since we've already blown determinism by being in a cycle, this seems unlikely to be very helpful. Also, by skipping this we can keep all of our changes in the JITter and out of the GC, which simplifies the initial implementation.
   
• We'd plan on adding ref-counting at the runtime level in the JITter so that all languages gain the benefits w/o updating the compilers (or mandating anything special in any language). The real work is figuring out which IL instructions require AddRef/Release calls and getting those calls into the instruction stream. Because of this, we're not likely to be able to handle tail calls (at least, initially). Anyone with advise in this area would be welcomed with open arms.
   
• We plan on working nicely with existing IDispose-based code. Since our ref-counting is all about calling the finalizer, if the ref-count gets to zero and there is no finalizer to call, no finalizer will be called. That means that Dispose implementations that call GC.SuppressFinalize will not cause any problems with the ref-counter. Of course, the goal is that the IDisposable.Dispose protocol is not necessary at all.
   
• As a potential optimization, I have found a nice place to store a 7-bit ref-count in the existing space allocated to every object, so there will be no space overhead, only CPU overhead. However, this narrows the number of objects per  process with synch blocks and/or hash values from 134 million to 1 million. It also narrows the number of referencing objects from the traditional 4 billion to 127. Anecdotally, 127 seems like enough, but it will necessitate the need to abandon ref-counting on any object that reaches 127 extent references. Since most data structures where more than 127 references could happen are parent-child, e.g. every child in a tree with a reference to the root, and this indicates a cycle that can't be handled by the ref-counting anyway, turning these objects over to the ref-tracking portion of the algorithm seems reasonable. However, we won't know 'til we look how many object references an object is going to have, so we'll track maximum reference counts during our tests to see if this optimization makes sense at all.