Chris Seaton passed away

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I am very sad to heard about the death of Chris Seaton, our collaborator.

Shopify generously sponsored the MMTk project to develop mmtk-ruby, a VM binding that enables Ruby to use MMTk as its garbage collector, and Chris has been the person actively working with us. Over the past few years, he has provided support for Angus Atkinson, the initial developer of mmtk-ruby, and me who continued the development of mmtk-ruby after Angus. Although we never met in person, I received great help from him during regular online meetings. He helped me getting familiar with the Ruby runtime with which I had no prior experience, and provided suggestions handling impedance mismatches between MMTk and Ruby. While I focused on getting MMTk to work, he helped with adding MMTk-related version flags, command-line options and other ergonomics. He fixed tests and set up a nightly build server. He helped identifying bugs in MMTk and its API. He also helped promoting our project, letting the community know our effort of improving Ruby with a powerful GC framework.

Sadly, Chris is no longer with us. It is a great loss for the MMTk project as well as the whole programming language and virtual machine community.