Atomic incremental garbage collection and recovery for a large stable heap
Elliot K. Kolodner, William E. Weihl · 1993
A stable heap is storage that is managed automatically using garbage collection, manipulated using atomic transactions, and accessed using a uniform storage model. These features enhance reliability and simplify programming by preventing errors due to explicit deallocation, by masking failures and concurrency using transactions, and by eliminating the distinction between accessing temporary storage and permanent storage. Stable heap management is useful for programming languages for reliable distributed computing, programming languages with persistent storage, and object-oriented database systems.