As a Java programmer, the concept of GC is not new to me. However, as long as I remember, the concept of GC in Java was tightly coupled with Java Memory Model and its generational hypothesis. It reached the point where I actually could put…
Up until now, we were concentrating on two aspects of the memory management – identifying live data, and a way to free unused memory. This post will concentrate on possibly the most important thing in memory management – allocating the memory. Two types of allocation…
The last ‘main’ of the GC algorithms that I’ve mentioned in the first post, was copying algorithm. The time has come then to dedicate a separate article to it. Basics of copying Algorithms already described suffer either from their execution time length, or resulting memory…
Up until know, in the previous posts, we’ve taken a look at how memory is retrieved by different GC methods. However, we did not look at the state, in which the memory is left after such process. Obviously this is a big deal – no…
Mark&sweep was already mentioned in the previous posts. It is a cornerstone of all the marking algorithms, and is used as a backup for cyclic data structures in the ref counting. The time has come then to take a deeper look at it. Basics of…
Reference counting is one of its kind GC algorithm. I’ve covered it briefly in the introductory post about GC theory. In this article, we’ll dive into it deeper. Let’s go! How to deal with ref-counting deficiencies? There are two main problems with ref-counting algorithms. First,…
In the world of garbage collection, there are three algorithms, that are the founding stone for all the other. In this article I will try to briefly introduce all of them – reference counting algorithm, mark-sweep and copying algorithm. More detailed articles about them will…