Mostly-Copying Garbage Collection Picks Up Generations and C++
Joel F. Bartlett · 1999
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++. Copyright 1989 Digital Equipment Corporation d i g i t a l Western Research Laboratory 100 Hamilton Avenue Palo Alto, California 94301 USA