For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by seanmcdirmid on Thursday May 09, 2019 @07:09AM (#19867070)

GC has always meant tracing GC while reference counting (ever since McCarthy invented it) was considered another form of automatic memory management (like using arenas, doing escape analysis, etc...). Only recently in hacker news have they become all merged into the same word, for some reason.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by chrisseaton on Thursday May 09, 2019 @08:15AM (#19867518)

> Only recently in hacker news have they become all merged

This is demonstrably not true. The Garbage Collection book by Jones is the key text in this area, and it covers reference counting under that term. It was published in 1996, before Hacker News existed.

There is also Bacon's Unified Theory of Garbage Collection, 2004, which said the two are on a spectrum that meets in the middle.

> all high-performance collectors (for example, deferred reference counting and generational collection) are in fact hybrids of tracing and reference counting

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by mcguire on Thursday May 09, 2019 @01:43PM (#19870396)

The updated Garbage Collection Handbook does as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by pjmlp on Friday May 10, 2019 @07:39AM (#19876824)

That reason are academic worthy books describing garbage collection algorithms, I can provide a couple of them.

Lets start with the Garbage Collection Handbook, chapter 5.

[ Parent | on HN ]