For mutating GCs, they stop the world when making changes so there's no erosion of the immutability contract in concurrent access. There are parallel GC systems that works quite well with multiple-core systems.
You write "stop the world" and "concurrent access" in the same sentence. What is up with that? When we manage to go for 10 years without getting 5 or 6 papers claiming to "solve the concurrent/pauseless GC problem" then, perhaps, it might be reasonable to present the problem as "solved."
I don't understand what you are trying to get at. I merely stated that the immutability contract for concurrent access at the language level is not violated when the underlying GC mutes the memory. "Stop the world" is the simple technique to ensure that consistency. Things at lower level change/mute all the times. Virtual memory makes memories appear to to be there but really aren't. Your object might got swapped out and brought back in underneath you. But all those changes at lower levels don't change the contract at higher level.
If your problem is with pauses during GC, well guess what computers pause all the times. Whenever you move your mouse or type on the keyboard, they generate interrupts that pause the whole CPU and it has to handle them. Those pauses don't seem to be a problem. If the small pauses in GC are acceptable in general usage, why not use them?
If you want hard guarantee, that's what realtime system is for.
It's an interesting problem that will probably never be solved, only optimized and amortized. That makes it good for papers!
The most efficient scheme probably is a "stop the world" system. The regular program might mutate concurrently and the GC could indeed be concurrent, but making them run at the same time is a real challenge.
Of course, people don't like it when their app pauses.
I think it's noteworthy that there never was a big office suite or even a web browser written primarily in a GC system, despite many years of promises.
Re: office suites, the code bases of the major office suites pre-date the rise of Java, which brought GC into the mainstream. Lot's of apps bigger and more complex than an office suite have been written in Java.
As for web browsers... every web browser has a GC...
office suites, the code bases of the major office suites pre-date the rise of Java, which brought GC into the mainstream.
Yes, but Java and GC proponents talked up the possibility at the time. There were various projects to do pure-java office suites and web browsers. The time or two I tried them they were memory pigs and slow.
Lot's of apps bigger and more complex than an office suite have been written in Java.
Many that take take heavy user interactivity? Eclipse perhaps, but IBM had to come up with a custom native-code UI toolkit to implement it. I still considered it too slow to use until the last year or so.
As for web browsers... every web browser has a GC...
Last I looked (a long time ago) my impression was that DOM and Javascript interpreter objects were usually refcounted internally. Did this changed?