Applying Garbage Collection Concepts to Solve Bidirectional Parsing Problems
By
surprisetalk
Crackling crust, pillowy middle. The kind of bagel that earns a second cup of coffee.
Summary
The author reflects on how their past experience working on garbage collection in the J9 Java VM continues to be valuable in their current work. They describe how insights from a garbage collection paper helped solve a tricky problem with bidirectional updates between Ohm text parsing and ProseMirror rich text rendering. The article explains the technical challenge of maintaining consistency between the two systems and how garbage collection concepts provided a solution.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledA long time ago, I spent a few years working on garbage collection in the J9 Java VM. And even though I've since done mostly higher-level stuff, having a deeper knowledge of GC has continued to come in useful.
Yesterday, it was an insight from one of my favourite GC papers, A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection, which helped me solve a tricky problem.
The goal is bidirectional updates: changes in ProseMirror should update the source text, and changes to the source text should update the ProseMirror representation.
Having a deeper knowledge of GC has continued to come in useful in unexpected ways, even when working on higher-level problems.
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