path: root/gc/doc/README.contributors

This is an attempt to acknowledge early contributions to the garbage
collector.  Later contributions should instead be mentioned in
README.changes.

HISTORY -

  Early versions of this collector were developed as a part of research
projects supported in part by the National Science Foundation
and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency.

The garbage collector originated as part of the run-time system for
the Russell programming language implementation. The first version of the
garbage collector was written primarily by Al Demers.  It was then refined
and mostly rewritten, primarily by Hans-J. Boehm, at Cornell U., 
the University of Washington, Rice University (where it was first used for
C and assembly code), Xerox PARC, SGI, and HP Labs.  However, significant
contributions have also been made by many others.

Some other contributors:  

More recent contributors are mentioned in the modification history in
README.changes.  My apologies for any omissions.

The SPARC specific code was originally contributed by Mark Weiser.
The Encore Multimax modifications were supplied by
Kevin Kenny (kenny@m.cs.uiuc.edu).  The adaptation to the IBM PC/RT is largely
due to Vernon Lee, on machines made available to Rice by IBM.
Much of the HP specific code and a number of good suggestions for improving the
generic code are due to Walter Underwood.
Robert Brazile (brazile@diamond.bbn.com) originally supplied the ULTRIX code.
Al Dosser (dosser@src.dec.com) and Regis Cridlig (Regis.Cridlig@cl.cam.ac.uk)
subsequently provided updates and information on variation between ULTRIX
systems.  Parag Patel (parag@netcom.com) supplied the A/UX code.
Jesper Peterson(jep@mtiame.mtia.oz.au), Michel Schinz, and
Martin Tauchmann (martintauchmann@bigfoot.com) supplied the Amiga port.
Thomas Funke (thf@zelator.in-berlin.de(?)) and
Brian D.Carlstrom (bdc@clark.lcs.mit.edu) supplied the NeXT ports.
Douglas Steel (doug@wg.icl.co.uk) provided ICL DRS6000 code.
Bill Janssen (janssen@parc.xerox.com) supplied the SunOS dynamic loader
specific code. Manuel Serrano (serrano@cornas.inria.fr) supplied linux and
Sony News specific code.  Al Dosser provided Alpha/OSF/1 code.  He and
Dave Detlefs(detlefs@src.dec.com) also provided several generic bug fixes.
Alistair G. Crooks(agc@uts.amdahl.com) supplied the NetBSD and 386BSD ports.
Jeffrey Hsu (hsu@soda.berkeley.edu) provided the FreeBSD port.
Brent Benson (brent@jade.ssd.csd.harris.com) ported the collector to
a Motorola 88K processor running CX/UX (Harris NightHawk).
Ari Huttunen (Ari.Huttunen@hut.fi) generalized the OS/2 port to
nonIBM development environments (a nontrivial task).
Patrick Beard (beard@cs.ucdavis.edu) provided the initial MacOS port.
David Chase, then at Olivetti Research, suggested several improvements.
Scott Schwartz (schwartz@groucho.cse.psu.edu) supplied some of the
code to save and print call stacks for leak detection on a SPARC.
Jesse Hull and John Ellis supplied the C++ interface code.
Zhong Shao performed much of the experimentation that led to the
current typed allocation facility.  (His dynamic type inference code hasn't
made it into the released version of the collector, yet.)