Question

I am studying GC implementations, and I’m currently looking for references and good open-source GC examples to base in.

Is there any good and simple generational GC implementation ? The second best thing would be good resources and guidelines!

Thank you!

Answer 1

I’ve wrote the Qish garbage collector (not really maintained any more, but feel free to ask). It is a free copying generational GC for C (with some coding styles restrictions).

The GCC MELT [meta-]plugin (free, GPLv3 licensed), providing a high level language, MELT, to extend the GCC compiler, also has a copying generational GC above the existing Ggc garbage collector of GCC. Look into gcc/melt-runtime.c

With generational copying GC, generating the application’s code in C is quite useful. See my DSL2011 paper on MELT

Feel free to ask me more, I love talking about my GC-s.

Of course, reading the Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (Jones, Hosking, Moss) [ISBN-13: 978-1420082791] is a must

---

^{(added in 2017)}

Look also into Ravenbrook’s Memory Pool System which can be used for generational GC.

Look also into the runtime of Ocaml, which has a good (single-threaded) generational GC.

---

PS. Debugging a generational copying GC is painful.