The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2nd Ed)

Richard Jones’s Garbage Collection (Wiley, 1996) was a milestone book 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. However, 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, and the environments in which programs are executed. 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.

The nearly universal adoption of garbage collection by 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.