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. 1. Introduction Many modern programming environments use heap storage with garbage collection. Allocated cells that are not reachable (via a chain of pointers) from the runtime stack are the "garbage," and they are "collected" for re-use by a traversal algorithm. This algorithm typically marks all of the reachable cells using a depth-first search, and then collects all the unmarked cells[1]; this takes time proportional to total number of (reachable and garbage) cells. In languages without garbage collection (i.e. Pascal, C, etc.), the programmer must...

Citations

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