Questions tagged [garbage-collection]
For questions about garbage collection within the scope of designing/implementing a programming language, including implementing garbage collectors, the semantics or behavior of garbage collection algorithms, and language features exposing garbage collection to the programmer.
17 questions
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Idiomatic memory allocation and garbage collection in LLVM
I am working on a new backend for a programming language using LLVM IR. This language makes a distinction between basic values and pointers to nodes on the heap, and uses a copying collector for ...
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A kind of "weak reference" which keeps the object alive, as long as there is otherwise-unused memory
Modern operating systems usually use some of the main memory for caching files, as loading those files from the cache will be faster than loading them from disk; but this memory can be reclaimed by ...
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Analysis of methods to ensure memory safety
Overview
Ensuring memory safety is a core facet of modern programming language design. Memory safety can be guaranteed in many different ways.
For the purposes of this question, I am defining memory ...
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How does a simple mark-and-sweep GC stop the other threads?
I'm reading the GC Handbook and trying to implement the first collector type described there, a basic mark and sweep. I know this is not the greatest way to implement a garbage collector, but I want ...
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What are the limitations of combining tracing GC with manual memory management?
TL;DR: Could a programming language that uses manual memory management use a tracing GC to rescue the usual suspects of memory leaks?
I was reading about the Boehm GC and came across this page that ...
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How do languages with only reference counting deal with closures?
Reference counting works best if there are no cycles. But closures that allow access to every variable in the parent scope by default automatically create cycles.
There are obvious solutions like only ...
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Does a Rust implementation of the Monkey programming language require a garbage collector?
Awhile back I wrote a Rust implementation of the Monkey programming language by Thorsten Ball (https://monkeylang.org/). When I got done with it I was a bit surprised that I never used an Arc/Rc ...
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When do functional programming languages need advanced garbage collection?
While thinking about garbage collection, I realized a simple fact that a garbage collector that is more than reference counting is needed because there are circular references, but there are ...
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Does using Rust eliminate the need to implement garbage collection in a language?
I am new to language development. I am aware of Rust's ownership model that builds programs in a way that does not need garbage collection.
So if I am to build a new programming language using safe ...
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Possible to mix garbage collection and manual memory management?
Do you think it is possible to have a language that uses garbage collection (GC) by default, but allows you take more control with manual memory management like C++ or Rust, in areas of the software ...
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Is it possible to make GC a library?
Motivation
Garbage collection is a critical component of memory management in many programming languages.
Many languages have built-in garbage collectors tightly integrated into their runtime ...
- 3,458
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What are the pros and cons of different ways of forcing resources to be closed properly?
There are various external resources, like file handles, TCP connections, and various servers, which need to be closed in some specific way before being dropped. There are a few approaches to these ...
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How to find the updated address of an object in a moving garbage collector?
I'm implementing a moving garbage collection algorithm, but I don't know how the GC can find an object's address after it has been moved. I thought of 3 options:
Forwarding Pointer
The first way is to ...
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How does the performance of reference counting and tracing GC compare?
We already have a more general question about different types of garbage collection, but performance is only touched on briefly, and in pretty unspecific ways. What are the more specific ways in which ...
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How do precise garbage collectors find roots in the stack?
I know some garbage collectors (conservative GC) treat every word in the stack as a potential pointer to a live object in the heap (provided that the word actually points to somewhere inside an ...
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