High-Level Programming Languages for Embedded Systems: Garbage Collection and FPGAs

Just when it looked like the big guys (well, basically Apple, that big chunk of the NASDAQ) were moving away from tracing garbage collectors, researchers from IBM Research has taken the leap to bring garbage collection to FPGAs [PDF]. Though hardware-assisted garbage collection isn't new, this degree of implementation of a complete concurrent garbage collector on an FPGA is. The authors consider this a first step in bringing high-level languages to the FPGA and embedded computing realm. It should be interesting to see where this goes.