bartlett@decwrl.dec.com (Joel Bartlett) (12/09/89)
A technical report describing a generational, compacting garbage collector for C++ is available from Digital's Western Research Lab: WRL Technical Note TN-12 Mostly-Copying Garbage Collection Picks Up Generations and C++ Joel Bartlett October 1989 The "mostly-copying" garbage collection algorithm provides a way to perform compacting garbage collection in spite of the presence of ambiguous pointers in the root set. As originally defined, each collection required almost all accessible objects to be moved. While adequate for many applications, programs that retained a large amount of storage spent a significant amount of time garbage collecting. To improve performance of these applications, a generational version of the algorithm has been designed. This note reports on this extension of the algorithm, and its application in collectors for Scheme and C++. For instructions on how to order a hard copy report or have the Postscript e-mailed to you, send a message to our technical report server at Wrl-Techreports@decwrl.dec.com with the word "help" in the subject line. jfb