Garbage collection: implementation, innovation, performance, and security (keynote)
Stephen Michael Blackburn · 2020
Garbage collection is a key technology underpinning many popular languages today. However, garbage collectors are the epitome of performance- and security-critical low-level systems programming. They are notoriously difficult to implement correctly and are extremely performance-sensitive. Performance, innovation, and security are often viewed as being in tension; all the more so in systems programming. In this talk, I will reflect on my experience in academia and industry building garbage collectors, and will particularly address the question of how critical systems software can be engineered to maximize performance, innovation and security.