Practical and Efficient Lock-Free Garbage Collection Based on Reference Counting

We present an efficient and practical lock-free implementation of a garbage collection scheme based on reference counting aimed for the use with arbitrary lock-free dynamic data structures. The scheme guarantees the safety of local as well as global references, supports arbitrary memory reuse, uses atomic primitives which are available in modern computer systems and provides an upper bound on the memory prevented for reuse. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first lock-free algorithm that provides all of these properties. Experimental results indicate significant performance improvements for lock-free data structures that require strong garbage collection.