Abstract

Generational garbage collection is an established method for creating efficient garbage collectors. Even a simple implementation where all nodes that survive one garbage collection are tenured, i.e., moved to an old generation, works well in strict languages. In a lazy language, however, such an implementation can create severe temporary space leaks. The temporary space leaks appear in programs that traverse large lazily built data structures, e.g., a lazy list representing a large le, where only a small part is needed at any time. A simple generational garbage collector can not reclaim the memory, used by the lazily built list, at minor collections. The reason is that at least one of the nodes in the list belongs to the old generation, after the first minor collection, and will hold on to the rest of the nodes in the list until the next major collection takes place. To completely abandon the idea with generational garbage collection for lazy languages is however an overkill since the f...

Citations