Currently we allocate white for most of concurrent marking. This is
based on the classical argument that it produces less floating
garbage, since allocations during GC may not get linked into the heap
and allocating white lets us reclaim these. However, it's not clear
how often this actually happens, especially since our write barrier
shades any pointer as soon as it's installed in the heap regardless of
the color of the slot.
On the other hand, allocating black has several advantages that seem
to significantly outweigh this downside.
1) It naturally bounds the total scan work to the live heap size at
the start of a GC cycle. Allocating white does not, and thus depends
entirely on assists to prevent the heap from growing faster than it
can be scanned.
2) It reduces the total amount of scan work per GC cycle by the size
of newly allocated objects that are linked into the heap graph, since
objects allocated black never need to be scanned.
3) It reduces total write barrier work since more objects will already
be black when they are linked into the heap graph.
This gives a slight overall improvement in benchmarks.
name old time/op new time/op delta
XBenchGarbage-12 2.24ms ± 0% 2.21ms ± 1% -1.32% (p=0.000 n=18+17)