What language to choose for Harmony GC development?

During Harmony GC development starting from GCv5, I made a design decision that we should try to keep the programming language "C" compatible. Although GCv5 uses certain C++ style, e.g., the source file names are using cpp suffix, we tried to avoid any C++ specific things.

The reasons I chose C for GCv5 development are:

1. We want GCv5 to control all its own memory, i.e., there is no hidden memory management brought in by the language. Writing GC in C++ doesn’t cause serious problem in this issue, but the problem is obvious when writing GC in Java, where there are lots of hidden objects allocated.

2. We try to keep GCv5’s capability for other runtimes written in C, which is common in open source community, such as Linux kernel, gcj, Ruby, etc. We expect one day GCv5 can be applied to some of them, although I don’t know when it will. We had successfully ported a version of GC to Ruby 1.9 last year.

3. We want to make GCv5 self-sufficient with all its own encapsulated utils, so that it can be easily ported to other languages if we want. For example, this design makes it very easy to write GC Runtime Helpers in Java. (I will talk about the runtime helpers later.)

4. In the early stage of GCv5 development, I used some C++ data structures such as linked list, vector, etc., then I removed them gradually, because we want to have delicate control on synchronous accesses to the data structures, such as sync-queue, sync-list, etc.

The arguments above are not strong enough though. I have to say it’s also kind of perfectionism. :)