Abstract

A very old and simple algorithm for garbage collection gives very good results when the physical memory is much larger than the number of reachable cells. In fact, the overhead associated with allocating and collecting cells from the heap can be reduced to less than one instruction per cell by increasing the size of physical memory. Special hardware, intricate garbage-collection algorithms, and fancy compiler analysis become unnecessary.

Citations

1497	The Definition of Standard ML - Milner, Tofte, et al. - 1990
301	Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I - McCarthy - 1960
234	A Real-Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetime of Objects - Lieberman, Hewitt - 1983
202	List processing in real time on a serial computer - Baker - 1978
136	Garbage collection in a large LISP system - Moon - 1984
110	A Method for Overlapping and Erasure of Lists - Collins - 1960
76	Yochelson: A LISP garbage-collector for virtual-memory computer systems - Fenichel, J - 1969
4	Rabbit: a compiler for Scheme," AI-TR-474 - Steele - 1978