Garbage Collection in the Prop Library

. GARBAGE COLLECTION IN THE PROP LIBRARY   In this appendix we describe the design and implementation of a garbage collector based on the Customisable Memory Management framework(CMM)[AF] in our Prop C++ class library. Like the previous approach, we have implemented a mostly copying conservative collector based on the work of Bartlett[Bar88]. Similar to CMM, our architecture provides a protocol to allow multiple garbage collectors using different algorithms to coexist in the same memory space. A few improvements are made to improve the performance, the flexibility and the functionality of our collector: to reduce retention due to false roots identification, blacklisting[Boe93] is used to identify troublesome heap addresses; the architecture of the system has been generalized so that it is now possible to have multiple instantiations of Bartlett-style heaps; finally, object finalization and weak pointer support are added. Our collector has been tested on gcc 2.5.8 under Linux, and SunOS 4.1.x¹⁴

 
• Introduction
• The Framework
• Our Framework
• The Implementation
• Architecture
• The Programmatic Interface
• Memory Allocation
• The GC Protocol
• Messages and Statistics
• The Bartlett style mostly copying collector
• The Mark Sweep collector
• Finalization
  • Weak Pointers
  • The Heap Walker