We survey basic garbage collection algorithms and variations such as incremental and gen erational collection The basic algorithms include reference counting mark sweep mark compact copy ing and treadmill collection Incremental techniques can keep garbage collection pause times short by interleaving small amounts of collection work with program execution Generational schemes improve e ciency an...

Published correctness proofs of garbage collectors in separation logic to date depend on extensive manual, interactive formula manipulations. This paper shows that the approach of symbolic execution in separation logic, as first developed by Smallfoot, also encompasses reasoning about object graphs given by the reachability of objects. This approach yields semi-automatic proofs of two central g...

Generational garbage collectors need to keep track of references from older to younger generations so that younger generations can be garbage-collected without inspecting every object in the older generation(s) [LH83], [Ung86]. The set of locations potentially containing pointers to newer objects is often called the remembered set [Ung86]. At every store, the system must ensure that the updated...

A field study designed to reveal the physiological workload on garbage collectors (GC) was conducted in Japan. Three drivers who only operated a garbage truck, three loaders who actually collected as a team, three solo collectors, and one clerical worker, totaling 10 male workers participated in this study. The ambient temperature and the relative humidity, activity intensity, and heart rate we...

The runtime data structures of the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler are simple yet general. As a result, code generators are easy to implement, programs execute quickly, garbage collectors are easy to implement and work efficiently, and a variety of runtime facilities can be provided with ease.

With the continued growth of distributed systems as a means to provide shared data, designers are turning their attention to garbage collection, prompted by the complexity of memory management and the desire for transparent object management. Garbage collection in very large address spaces is a di cult and unsolved problem, due to problems of e ciency, fault-tolerance, scalability and completen...

Garbage collectors are very hard to implement correctly due to their low-level manipulation of memory. In this paper, we construct a copying garbage collector which we have proved to be functionally correct. Our verification proof is structured as a sequence of refinements to aid clarity and proof reuse; it is the first to map implementations into three different machine languages and, unlike s...

Given the widespread use of memory-safe languages, students must understand garbage collection well. Following a constructivist philosophy, an effective approach would be to have them implement garbage collectors. Unfortunately, a full implementation depends on substantial knowledge of compilers and runtime systems, which many courses do not cover or cannot assume. This paper presents an instru...

The Open Runtime Platform (ORP) is a high-performance managed runtime environment (MRTE) that features exact generational garbage collection, fast thread synchronization, and multiple coexisting just-in-time compilers (JITs). ORP was designed for flexibility in order to support experiments in dynamic compilation, garbage collection, synchronization, and other technologies. It can be built to ru...