The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management

Published in 1996, Richard Jones’s Garbage Collection was a milestone in the area of automatic memory management. Its widely acclaimed successor, The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management, captured the state of the field in 2012. Modern technology developments have made memory management more challenging, interesting and important than ever. This second edition updates the handbook, bringing together a wealth of knowledge gathered by automatic memory management researchers and developers over the past sixty years. The authors compare the most important approaches and state-of-the-art techniques in a single, accessible framework.

The book addresses new challenges to garbage collection made by recent advances in hardware and software. It explores the consequences of these changes for designers and implementers of high performance garbage collectors. Along with simple and traditional algorithms, the book covers state-of-the-art parallel, incremental, concurrent and real-time garbage collection. Algorithms and concepts are often described with pseudocode and illustrations.

Features of this edition

• Provides a complete, up-to-date, and authoritative sequel to the 1996 and 2012 books
• Offers thorough coverage of parallel, concurrent, and real-time garbage collection algorithms
• Discusses in detail modern, high-performance commercial collectors
• Explains some of the trickier aspects of garbage collection, including the interfaceto the run-time system
• Over 90 more pages including new chapters on persistence and energy-aware garbage collection
• Backed by a comprehensive online database of over 3,400 garbage collection-related publications

The adoption of garbage collection by almost all modern programming languages makes a thorough understanding of this topic essential for any programmer. This authoritative handbook gives expert insight on how different collectors work as well as the various issues currently facing garbage collectors. Armed with this knowledge, programmers can confidently select and configure the many choices of garbage collectors.