Visualization of Eiffel Garbage Collection with GCSpy

Increasingly many modern programming languages are turning to automatic reclamation, or garbage collection, to free up memory objects that are no longer needed. While there are many techniques known for detecting and collecting garbage, what remains a less well-known topic is how differing techniques perform in different application domains; a garbage collector that works well for a word processor may not work well for a database. In most instances, the only means of analysis of this problem is empirically. At the coarse level, statistics can be collected after each garbage collection to give the engineer some sense of how well the garbage collector performed. Most garbage collectors offer this option inherently. This approach can be effective, though what is really needed is the ability to visualize the entire heap and allow the engineer to draw conclusions from this fine-grained detail. Tools such as GCSpy are built to provide this visualization.