Resource Management in perspective: the Stack

An archetypical analogy of a stack data structure with a stack of plates.

Up to now, we have been focus­ing on where memory man­age­ment actu­ally occurs, the heap. But this is not the only memory seg­ment rel­ev­ant to a pro­gram. Indeed, in all garbage col­lec­ted tech­niques, there’re oth­er play­ers hav­ing a rel­ev­ant role in the game: the mutat­or and the root set. In the ref­er­ence coun­ted garbage collection, […]

Garbage Collectors in the real world

Well automatically cleaned factory

We saw the essen­tially two only ways to do Garbage Collection, and we saw their naive dis­ad­vant­ages. I say naive, because we saw the very simplist­ic imple­ment­a­tions. Like any­thing else in com­puter sci­ences, Garbage Collectors are an extremely optimised-(able) tool. Lets give it a quick intu­it­ive thought. Tracing under­goes long pause times, mostly because it […]