Re: Optimizing reference count garbage collection

paulj@cs.kun.nl writes:
>[How do I reduce the overhead of a reference counting storage manager?]


Deferred Reference Counting, invented by Peter Deutsch & Danny Bobrow.
The idea is not to reference count the stack, which accounts for the vast
majority of references. I use it in my Smalltalk interpreter & get good
performance, good enough to have no incentive to move to generational
garbage collection.


References:
Deutsch, L.P., Bobrow, D.G. 1976, An efficient, incremental, automatic
garbage collector, Comm. ACM, 19(9) pp522-526


Baden SB 1983, Low-overhead storage reclamation in the Smalltalk-80 virtual
machine, in Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice, Addison-Wesley,
pp 331-342


Miranda, E.E. 1987 BrouHaHa - a portable Smalltalk interpreter, OOPSLA '87,
SIGPLAN Notices 22(12), ACM, pp 354-365




P.S. The last paper also describes Peter Deutsch's add/subtract two reference
counting hack that has to be one of the all-time greats.
--
Eliot Miranda email: eliot@dcs.qmw.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science ARPA: eliot%dcs.qmw.ac.uk@nsf.ac.uk
Queen Mary Westfield College UUCP: eliot@qmw-dcs.uucp
Mile End Road, LONDON E1 4NS Tel: 071 975 5229 (+44 71 975 5229)
Fax: 081 980 6533 (+44 81 980 6533)
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