Predictions for 2021

  1. There will be processor in memory, and it will be x86 (Click)
  2. Distributed GC article in Wikipedia will be longer (Blackburn)
  3. Memory management will be so important that ISMM will dwarf PLDI (Bacon)
  4. Scripting languages will be a major GC workload (Blackburn)
  5. 99% of code, by source lines, will be GC’d; 99% of code, by instructions executed, will use malloc (Bacon)
  6. Secure/reliable systems require arch/PL/MM/OS/security/etc communities to build a cross-disciplinary solution (McKinley)
  7. Custom HW will be important to memory management (Blackburn)
  8. There will be hardware GC support in FPGAs and ASICs - it’s inevitable! (McKinley)
  9. There won’t be hardware GC support - don’t you ever learn?! (Boehm)
  10. No one will be developing applications with transactional memory (Bacon)
  11. Reference counting is back! (Hertz)
  12. Shared memory will give way to distinct local memories (Richards)
  13. Memory hierarchy will be "richer" (ie, much more complex), with SSD etc (Click)
  14. Data placement will have to be exposed at language level for performance, due to increasing complexity (Click)
  15. Any programming model that exposes the increased complexity of the memory system will fail (O’Neill)
  16. Jones et al will still be the definitive GC text (Jones)
  17. Most memory will be managed by dlmalloc (Click)
  18. Much memory will be managed by HotSpot, using dlmalloc (Click)
  19. Heterogeneous CMP will be a major target (Blackburn)
  20. Embedded/mobile device GC will become dominant (Blackburn)
  21. There will be an automatically verified concurrent, incremental, real-time garbage collector in production (Bacon)