Type-preserving garbage collectors

Rethinking age-based garbage collectors

Garbage collection has been around for a long time, and is accepted as a customary element for dynamic memory management in run-time systems of modern programming languages, for reasons of safety and for its clear software engineering benefits. The wide-spread acceptance of object-oriented languages makes it more important than ever to have garbage collection also work as fast as possible. The ...

Deriving Residual Reference Count Garbage Collectors

We present a strategy to derive an efficient reference count garbage collector for any applicative program by only modifying it on the source code level. The key to the approach is to consider the memory as an explicit parameter of the applicative program, thus enabling to implement data structures in terms of memory primitives. On the basis of equivalence preserving source level transformation...

Genetic Order and Compactifying Garbage Collectors

Draft Comparing Two Garbage Collectors for C++

Our research is concerned with compiler-independent, tag-free garbage collection for the C ++ programming language. This paper presents a mark-and-sweep collector , and explains how it ameliorates shortcomings of a previous copy collector. The new collector, like the old, uses C ++ 's facilities for creating abstract data types to deene a tracked reference type, called roots, at the level of th...

On the Algebraic Derivation of Garbage Collectors

We give an algebraic characterisation of reachability and non-reachability in modal Kleene algebras. By this we derive a general algorithm for garbage collectors and present some further algebraic optimisations. The given approach is fully expressible in first-order logic and hence provides an abstract and general framework for automated and machine-verified derivations of garbage collecting al...