Re: Garbage collection

wmccabe@hotmail.com (William McCabe) wrote
> I am in the process of writing my own programming language and I would
> like to use garbage collection as a means for automatic memory
> management. I have decided that I want to implement a two-stage
> generational copying collector.
>
> I know how a copying and generational collector works but Im not sure
> how they work when put together. In my mind, generational is similar
> to coping in being that they both seperate the heap into two
> semi-spaces, but use totaly different methods to collect garbage. Can
> someone shed some light on this subject for me.


    You can try to check what is done in Java, they use 4 generations
with different GC methods for different groups for one of their last
GCs:


http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc1.4.2/index.html
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp11253


    Notice that there is a problem with references from the "old"
objects to the "new" objects, these references need special treatment.


    BTW, I'm not sure that GC is a part of a compiler, it's usually a
part of runtime support of a language.
[It's runtime, but it's often useful to tweak the compiler to generate
code that makes GC easier. -John]

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.