I’m probably wrong, but didn’t the Symbolics LISP machines have some kind of hardware support for GC?
I think for platforms like Android this makes a lot of sense. Should help quite a bit with battery consumption and responsiveness. Also makes sense for server loads in Java or Go.
A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_architecture yes. Tags make life a bit easier for the CPU when it accesses objects and is deciding what to do with them, but the CPU is still doing all the work and walk the RAM to do the GC. (I vaguely recall stories about Lisp machine users who would turn off GC while working, and then let it run when they left work and returned the next day.) The idea here seems to be to have an entire separate chip, a specialized CPU, which walks RAM independently of the 'main' CPUs, whose only task is freeing up memory.
> I vaguely recall stories about Lisp machine users who would turn off GC while working
That was more in the early days when the GC was more primitive.
The later GC was actually several different ones. A huge impact had the so-called 'Ephemeral GC', where the machine tracks changed RAM memory (it uses virtual memory in general) and where the EGC focuses on those areas with objects which were only very short-lived. That means, given a sufficient amount of memory, the machine stayed fast and responsive for a long time.
The main problem was the low amount of RAM (20MB were common after the mid 80s), because RAM was very expensive, and the large amount of virtual memory (possibly hundreds of MB on slow disks).
You have a lot useless bits in a 64 bits pointers and thanks to the virtual memory, you can manage to have an untagged address and its corresponding tagged address referencing the same physical memory. This give you free bits that you can use to track the liveness/evacuation of a graph of objects.
Lisp Machines didn't use tags for tracking liveness/evacuation of objects, though. They used them for safety, which automatically gave them precise, as opposed to conservative, GC which always knew whether it was dealing with a pointer. They also had special, CPU-handled type of forwarding pointers, which when accessed "normally" would transparently redirect you to forwarded location.
The forwarding pointer you are describing is equivalent to a ZGC colored pointer with the evacuation bit set that a GC barrier (a load barrier) will rewrite to the evacuation address.
and yes ZGC doesn't use colored pointer to track if a value is an integer or a pointer because Java unlike Lisp is typed so the VM derives those information from the bytecode.
Most Lisp implementations use typed memory via tags. Lisp doesn't have pointers, but references and usually knows if something is an integer or a reference - because it's encoded in the tags.
Symbolics (and other systems like it) had typed memory with hw type checking (so you had safe memory by default), and had one important bit for efficient GC (one that is also utilized by Azul and Shenandoah) - forwarding pointers, in their case implemented "transparently" to actual code.
With forwarding pointer, you can copy data and update a reference in a way that is transparent to concurrently running code, as when it access the data again the CPU (or software implementation) will notice the data had been moved and follow the forwarding pointer to new location.
The rest of the support for GC was centered around structure of virtual memory, without anything very specific to GC in hw - we're talking about things like "memory is divided into X areas, inside each area the lower side is ephemeral... " etc. There was also some register use to keep track of GC status. I think some versions had MMU or page fault handler update the GC register data.
I think for platforms like Android this makes a lot of sense. Should help quite a bit with battery consumption and responsiveness. Also makes sense for server loads in Java or Go.