We survey basic garbage collection algorithms, and variations such as incremental and generational collection. The basic algorithms include reference counting, mark-sweep, mark-compact, copying, 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 effi...

In algorithms based on reference counting, a garbage-collection decision has to be made whenever a pointer x→ y is about to be destroyed. At this time, the node y may become dead even if y’s reference count is not zero. This is because y may belong to a piece of cyclic garbage. Some aggressive collection algorithms will put y on the list of potential garbage regardless of y’s reference count. L...

Over the decades, the Zabaleen, the traditional waste (garbage) collectors of Cairo, have created what is arguably one of the world‘s most efficient and sustainable resource-recovery and waste-recycling systems. Yet the continuation of this intricate relationship between community, environment and livelihood is jeopardized by the official privatization of municipal solid waste (MSW) services th...

GCspy is an architectural framework for the collection, transmission, storage and replay of memory management behaviour. It makes new contributions to the understanding of the dynamic memory behaviour of programming languages (and especially object-oriented languages that make heavy demands on the performance of memory managers). GCspy’s architecture allows easy incorporation into any memory ma...

We present an incremental copying garbage collector for the heap in WAM-based Prolog systems. We describe a heap layout in which the heap is divided in a number of equal-sized blocks. Other changes to the standard WAM allow to garbage collect these blocks independently from each other. Independent collection of heap blocks is the basis of our incremental algorithm. Compared to other copying col...

We address memory management aspects of WAM-based logic programming systems that support tabled evaluation through the use of a suspension/resumption mechanism. We describe the memory organization and usefulness logic of such systems, and issues that have to be resolved for effective and efficient garbage collection. Special attention is given to early reset in the context of suspended computat...

Programs written in garbage-collected languages like Java often have large working sets and poor locality. Worse, a full garbage collection must visit all live data and is likely to touch pages that are no longer resident, triggering paging. The result is a pronounced drop in throughput and a spike in latency. We show that just a slight reduction in available memory causes the throughput of the...

We propose adding safe, efficient garbage collection to C++, eliminating the possibility of storage-management bugs and making the design of complex, object-oriented systems much easier. This can be accomplished with almost no change to the language itself and only small changes to existing implementations, while retaining compatibility with existing class libraries. Our proposal is the first t...

The effectiveness of garbage collectors and leak detectors in identifying dead objects depends on the “accuracy” of their reachability traversal. Accuracy has two orthogonal dimensions: (i) whether the reachability traversal can distinguish between pointers and non-pointers (type accuracy), and (ii) whether the reachability traversal can identify memory locations that will be dereferenced in th...

According to conventional wisdom, interfaces provide flexibility at the cost of performance. Most high-performance Java virtual machines today tightly integrate their core virtual machines with their just-in-time compilers and garbage collectors to get the best performance. The Open Runtime Platform (ORP) is unusual in that it reconciles high performance with the extensive use of welldefined in...