Simple generational garbage collection and fast allocation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Generational garbage collection algorithms achieve efficiency because newer records point to older records; the only way an older record can point to a newer record is by a store operation to a previously created record, and such operations are rare in many languages. A garbage collector that concentrates just on recently allocated records can take advantage of this fact. Such a garbage collector can be so efficient that the allocation of records costs more than their disposal. A scheme for quick record allocation attacks this bottleneck. Many garbage‐collected environments do not know when to ask the operating system for more memory. A robust heuristic solves this problem. This paper presents a simple, efficient, low‐overhead version of generational garbage collection with fast allocation, suitable for implementation in a Unix environment.