GCspy port to SSCLI (Rotor)

With increasing importance and complexity of memory managers, it becomes more and more important for garbage collector (GC) developers to possess the right tools capable of helping them track GC behaviour. GCspy, an adaptable and easily portable visualisation framework, was developed to answer this issue. Our aim of porting GCspy to Rotor was motivated by the desire to provide Rotor with an efficient, flexible and yet portable Memory Visualiser. Although the CLRProfiler (A memory visualiser developed by Microsoft for the .NET framework) is a useful tool, GCspy possesses a number of advantages over the CLRProfiler, such as platform independence, the ability to connect and disconnect from virtual machines (VM) at runtime, and high performance. In an attempt to improve Rotor's memory management system, our project relies on RMTk [1], a powerful memory management framework designed to make the implementation of efficient new garbage collectors easy. The RMTk project, carried by Andrew Gray, provides Rotor with four different GCs to date, although more can be easily implemented. We introduce GCspy and RMTk in the following sections before reviewing the technical details of the implementation and exploring its functionalities.