Previous Contents Next

To Learn More

Memory reclamation techniques have been studied for forty years---in fact, since the first implementations of the Lisp programming language. For this reason, the literature in this area is enormous.

A comprehensive reference is Jones' book [Jon98]. Paul Wilson's tutorial [Wil92] is an excellent introduction to the field, with many references. The following web pages also provide a good view of the state of the art in memory management.

Link


ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html
is an introduction to sequential garbage collectors.

Link


http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html
contains the presentation of [Jon98] and includes a large searchable bibliography.

Link


http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~zorn/DSA.html
lists different tools for debugging garbage collection.

Link


http://reality.sgi.com/boehm_mti/
offers C source code for a conservative garbage collector for the C language. This garbage collector replaces the classical allocator malloc by a specialized version GC_malloc. Explicit recovery by free is replaced by a new version that no longer does anything.

Link


http://www.harlequin.com/mm/reference/links.html
maintains a list of links on this subject.

In chapter 12 on the interface between C and Objective CAML we come back to memory management.




Previous Contents Next