Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!usc!polyslo!ttwang
From: ttwang@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Thomas Wang)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Garbage collection
Keywords: Garbage collection, object management
Message-ID: <25eb4850.41d0@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 28 Feb 90 03:41:04 GMT
References: <2616@ifi.uio.no> <51078@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: ttwang@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Thomas Wang)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Cal Poly State University -- San Luis Obispo
Lines: 50


jimad@microsoft.UUCP (JAMES ADCOCK) writes:
>In article <2616@ifi.uio.no> kai@ifi.uio.no (Kai Ivo Quale) writes:
>>I'm looking for good books, articles, whatever, on garbage collection/
>>object (de)allocation...

>>Anyone out there have some tips ?

>Be suspicious of what you read.

Why?  Because the claims are too good to be true?

Here are some paper references I obtained while doing my master thesis:

A. W. Appel, "Garbage Collection Can Be Faster Than Stack Allocation",
Information Processing Letters, Vol. 25, no. 4, June 17, 1987, pp. 275-279

J. F. Bartlett, "Compacting Garbage Collection with Ambiguous Roots", no. 88/2
DEC Western Research Laboratory, Feb 1988.

R. Courts, "Improving Locality of Reference in a Garbage-Collecting Memory
Management System", CACM, Vol. 31, no. 9, Sep 1988, pp 1128-1138.

H. Lieberman and C. Hewitt, "A Real-Time Garbage Collector Based on the
Lifetimes of Objects", CACM, Vol. 26, no. 6, June 1983, pp 419-429.

D. Moon, "Garbage Collection in a Large Lisp System", ACM Symposium on Lisp and
Functional Programming, Austin, Texas, 1984, pp. 235-246.

P. R. Wilson and T. G. Moher, "Design of the Opportunistic Garbage Collector",
Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN 1989 Conference of Object-Oriented Programming:
Systems, Languages, and Applications, New Orleans, Louisiana, Oct 2-6, 1989.


The hypothesis of garbage collection is that it can significantly reduce the
number of memory management errors, while only introducing a small overhead.
This is certainly true for good implementation of garbage collectors.  In
languages such as C, only slow garbage collectors can be made to work.  I
think this and together with the traditional dogma contributed to the belief
that all garbage collectors are slow.

The reduced number of bugs mean lab engineers have more time for performance
improvement.


 -Thomas Wang ("This is a fantastic comedy that Ataru and his wife Lum, an
                invader from space, cause excitement involving their neighbors."
                  - from a badly translated Urusei Yatsura poster)

                                                     ttwang@polyslo.calpoly.edu