Table of Contents

Introduction. Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection. Mark-Compact Garbage Collection. Copying Garbage Collection. Reference Counting. Comparing Garbage Collectors. Allocation. Partitioning the Heap. Generational Garbage Collection. Other Partitioned Schemes. Run-Time Interface. Language-Specific Concerns. Concurrency Preliminaries. Parallel Garbage Collection. Concurrent Garbage Collection. Concurrent Mark-Sweep. Concurrent Copying and Compaction. Concurrent Reference Counting. Real-Time Garbage Collection. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

About the Author

Richard Jones is a professor of computer systems in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University and an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Kent. He spent a few years teaching at school and college before returning to higher education at the University of Kent. Antony Hosking is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. He earned a B.Sc. in mathematical sciences from the University of Adelaide, Australia, an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts. His work is in the area of programming language design and implementation, with specific interests in database and persistent programming languages, object-oriented database systems, dynamic memory management, compiler optimizations, and architectural support for programming languages and applications. Eliot Moss is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a B.S.E.E., an M.S.E.E., and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After four years of military service, Dr. Moss joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He works in the area of programming languages and their implementation and has built garbage collectors since 1978. In addition to his research on automatic memory management, he is known for his work on persistent programming languages, virtual machine implementation, and transactional memory. He worked with IBM researchers to license the Jikes RVM Java virtual machine for academic research, which eventually led to its release as an open source project.

Reviews

The Garbage Collection Handbook is the most up-to-date, detailed, and exhaustive collation and description of the current state of the art of the Garbage Collection and Automatic Memory Management available today. It is an imperative reference book for anyone working in the field, and I would consider it the textbook of reference covering GC 101 thru GC 530 course levels, if such courses were given at universities worldwide. As CTO of Azul Systems and co-creator of multiple modern concurrent collectors, Richard Jones' previous Garbage Collection book was indispensable to my work over the years. The Garbage Collection Handbook has immediately taken its place. Each of our GC engineers has a copy on their desk. --Gil Tene, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Azul Systems In a field replete with ephemera, this book, just like its predecessor, stands as a monumental work that will last for decades. --Dr. Mario Wolczko, Research Director, Oracle Labs