Published in 1996, Richard Jones's Garbage Collection was a milestone in the area of automatic memory management. The field has grown considerably since then, sparking a need for an updated look at the latest state-of-the-art developments. The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management brings together a wealth of knowledge gathered by automatic memory management researchers and developers over the past fifty years. The authors compare the most important approaches and state-of-the-art techniques in a single, accessible framework. The book addresses new challenges to garbage collection made by recent advances in hardware and software. It explores the consequences of these changes for designers and implementers of high performance garbage collectors. Along with simple and traditional algorithms, the book covers parallel, incremental, concurrent, and real-time garbage collection. Algorithms and concepts are often described with pseudocode and illustrations. The nearly universal adoption of garbage collection by modern programming languages makes a thorough understanding of this topic essential for any programmer. This authoritative handbook gives expert insight on how different collectors work as well as the various issues currently facing garbage collectors. Armed with this knowledge, programmers can confidently select and configure the many choices of garbage collectors. Web Resource The book's online bibliographic database at www.gchandbook.org includes over 2,500 garbage collection-related publications. Continually updated, it contains abstracts for some entries and URLs or DOIs for most of the electronically available ones. The database can be searched online or downloaded as BibTeX, PostScript, or PDF.

About the Author

Richard Jones is a professor of computer systems in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University and an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Kent. He spent a few years teaching at school and college before returning to higher education at the University of Kent. Antony Hosking is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. He earned a B.Sc. in mathematical sciences from the University of Adelaide, Australia, an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts. His work is in the area of programming language design and implementation, with specific interests in database and persistent programming languages, object-oriented database systems, dynamic memory management, compiler optimizations, and architectural support for programming languages and applications. Eliot Moss is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a B.S.E.E., an M.S.E.E., and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After four years of military service, Dr. Moss joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He works in the area of programming languages and their implementation and has built garbage collectors since 1978. In addition to his research on automatic memory management, he is known for his work on persistent programming languages, virtual machine implementation, and transactional memory. He worked with IBM researchers to license the Jikes RVM Java virtual machine for academic research, which eventually led to its release as an open source project.

Table of Contents

Introduction Explicit deallocation Automatic dynamic memory management Comparing garbage collection algorithms A performance disadvantage? Experimental methodology Terminology and notation Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection The mark-sweep algorithm The tricolor abstraction Improving mark-sweep Bitmap marking Lazy sweeping Cache misses in the marking loop Issues to consider Mark-Compact Garbage Collection Two-finger compaction The Lisp 2 algorithm Threaded compaction One-pass algorithms Issues to consider Copying Garbage Collection Semispace copying collection Traversal order and locality Issues to consider Reference Counting Advantages and disadvantages of reference counting Improving efficiency Deferred reference counting Coalesced reference counting Cyclic reference counting Limited-field reference counting Issues to consider Comparing Garbage Collectors Throughput Pause time Space Implementation Adaptive systems A unified theory of garbage collection Allocation Sequential allocation Free-list allocation Fragmentation Segregated-fits allocation Combining segregated-fits with first-, best-, and next-fit Additional considerations Allocation in concurrent systems Issues to consider Partitioning the Heap Terminology Why to partition How to partition When to partition Generational Garbage Collection Example Measuring time Generational hypotheses Generations and heap layout Multiple generations Age recording Adapting to program behavior Inter-generational pointers Space management Older-first garbage collection Beltway Analytic support for generational collection Issues to consider Abstract generational garbage collection Other Partitioned Schemes Large object spaces Topological collectors Hybrid mark-sweep, copying collectors Bookmarking garbage collection Ulterior reference counting Issues to consider Run-Time Interface Interface to allocation Finding pointers Object tables References from external code Stack barriers GC safe points and mutator suspension Garbage collecting code Read- and write-barriers Managing address space Applications of virtual memory page protection Choosing heap size Issues to consider Language-Specific Concerns Finalization Weak references Issues to consider Concurrency Preliminaries Hardware Hardware memory consistency models Hardware primitives Progress guarantees Notation used for concurrent algorithms Mutual exclusion Work sharing and termination detection Concurrent data structures Transactional memory Issues to consider Parallel Garbage Collection Is there sufficient work to parallelize? Load balancing Synchronization Taxonomy Parallel marking Parallel copying Parallel sweeping Parallel compaction Issues to consider Concurrent Garbage Collection Correctness of concurrent collection Barrier techniques for concurrent collection Issues to consider Concurrent Mark-Sweep Initialization Termination Allocation Concurrent marking and sweeping On-the-fly marking Abstract concurrent collection Issues to consider Concurrent Copying and Compaction Mostly concurrent copying: Baker's algorithm Brooks' indirection barrier Self-erasing read barriers Replication copying Multi-version copying Sapphire Concurrent compaction Issues to consider Concurrent Reference Counting Simple reference counting revisited Buffered reference counting Concurrent, cyclic reference counting Taking a snapshot of the heap Sliding views reference counting Issues to consider Real-Time Garbage Collection Real-time systems Scheduling real-time collection Work-based real-time collection Slack-based real-time collection Time-based real-time collection: Metronome Combining scheduling approaches: Tax-and-Spend Controlling fragmentation Issues to consider Glossary Bibliography Index

Reviews

The Garbage Collection Handbook is the most up-to-date, detailed, and exhaustive collation and description of the current state of the art of the Garbage Collection and Automatic Memory Management available today. It is an imperative reference book for anyone working in the field, and I would consider it the textbook of reference covering GC 101 thru GC 530 course levels, if such courses were given at universities worldwide. As CTO of Azul Systems and co-creator of multiple modern concurrent collectors, Richard Jones' previous Garbage Collection book was indispensable to my work over the years. The Garbage Collection Handbook has immediately taken its place. Each of our GC engineers has a copy on their desk. --Gil Tene, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Azul Systems In a field replete with ephemera, this book, just like its predecessor, stands as a monumental work that will last for decades. --Dr. Mario Wolczko, Research Director, Oracle Labs