Expiration Classes for Implicit Memory Management

Expiration classes are a concept to analyze memory management systems. It reveals the costs and the source of costs. Explicit memory management, garbage collection, region-based memory management and cyclic allocation are analyzed in this master thesis. Furthermore, we present AGC, a new memory management system which combines garbage collection with cyclic allocation. Cyclic allocation has very good timing properties and predictable space consumption, but it is hard to use. On the other hand, garbage collection is very convenient, but it has some unwanted side e ects, like long pause times. AGC can use the advantage of both systems, with only small overhead. Benchmarks show that AGC is competitive to other garbage collected systems.