Yes. And if you read their papers, when they were able to add explicit hardware support they were able to do even better.
I really think had vertical companies from the 90s not all died, seriously developing chips for personal computers (phones,laptops) with hardware support for the most important GC features would have been a huge winner.
Apple could have done this but they were already bound to Object-C because of Next.
Sun had the amazing Self VM in the early 90s already. And they made their own chips as well. But unfortunately they went with Java and instead of making a chip to support GC they tried to make a chip that implemented Java.
I know its more complicated, I was not trying to give a full history.
As I pointed out in my original comment:
> But unfortunately they went with Java and instead of making a chip to support GC they tried to make a chip that implemented Java.
I think in the 2000s Azul hit on how to combine high performance JIT, high performance GC with a number GC specific updates for the hardware and the OS.
I really think had vertical companies from the 90s not all died, seriously developing chips for personal computers (phones,laptops) with hardware support for the most important GC features would have been a huge winner.
Apple could have done this but they were already bound to Object-C because of Next.
Sun had the amazing Self VM in the early 90s already. And they made their own chips as well. But unfortunately they went with Java and instead of making a chip to support GC they tried to make a chip that implemented Java.