[virtmach] garbage collection

[Dwight Hughes]

I have the Implementation chapters from "Smalltalk-80:The Language and
Its Implementation" up on my site: 
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_imp_toc.html

I should note that the state of the art in Smalltalk GC has moved beyond
this, but it is still a very useful and informative reference. Most
Smalltalks use a generational GC as their primary GC mechanism -  "A
Real Time Garbage Collector Based On The Lifetimes of Objects" by Henry
Lieberman and Carl Hewitt,Communications of the ACM, June 1983: 
http://lieber.www.media.mit.edu/people/lieber/Lieberary/GC/GC.html

-- Dwight

David Rush wrote:
> 
> thaddaeus.frogley@creaturelabs.com writes:
> > Anyone got any links and / or advice on garbage collection ? :)
[snip]
> > I'm thinking, VM (obviously), single threaded environment, indexes into a
> > repository containing polymorphic objects act as handles and are stored on
> > an untyped stack.
> 
> You're looking at a model that is very similiar to the original
> Smalltalk-80 VM's GC scheme. _Smalltalk-80:The_Language_and_Its_Implementation_
> is the canonical reference for it. I don't know if it can still be
> bought. The central idea is the use of a master 'object table' so each
> object reference is doubly-indirect. This makes object relocation very
> easy, albeit at a somewhat higher constant overhead for every object
> reference.