#
#
# some history on garbage collection in ATS
#
#

Rick Lavoie (coldfury AT cs DOT bu DOT edu) implemented the first garbage
collector (GC) for ATS in the summer of 2006. Later, he added into this GC
some support for threads.

Largely following Rick's work, Hongwei Xi (hwxi AT cs DOT bu DOT edu)
implemented a GC for ATS in the summer of 2007. In this implementation,
some of the code was written in ATS, but overall ATS did not seem to be
ready for a complex task as such. Hongwei had the experience of identifying
and then fixing many subtle and inscrutable bugs in this GC but was still
unable to stop some mysterious crashes caused by this GC.

In June 2008, Hongwei initiated another implementation of GC for ATS.  He
followed Rick's design closely and wrote a large portion of code in ATS.
This GC was coded and tested and then put into practical use in just a
period of two weeks (June 20 - July 4). This fast development yields some
strong evidence in support of making use of ATS in systems programming.

###### end of [README] #####
