Collecting Cyclic Garbage across Foreign Function Interfaces: Who Takes the Last Piece of Cake?

A growing number of libraries written in managed languages, such as Python and JavaScript, are bringing about new demand for a foreign language interface (FFI) between two languages. Such an FFI allows host-language program to seamlessly call library function exchange objects. It is often implemented by user-level but implementation cannot reclaim cyclic garbage, or group objects with circular references, across the boundary. This paper proposes Refgraph GC , which enables that can garbage. coordinates garbage collectors languages it needs modify runtime one only. does not other language. discusses soundness completeness proposed algorithm also shows results experiments our GC. Ruby access JavaScript library.