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Garbage collection in a large LISP system

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David A. MoonAuthors Info & Claims

LFP '84: Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming

Pages 235 - 246

https://doi.org/10.1145/800055.802040

Published: 06 August 1984 Publication History

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Abstract

This paper discusses garbage collection techniques used in a high-performance Lisp implementation with a large virtual memory, the Symbolics 3600. Particular attention is paid to practical issues and experience. In a large system problems of scale appear and the most straightforward garbage-collection techniques do not work well. Many of these problems involve the interaction of the garbage collector with demand-paged virtual memory. Some of the solutions adopted in the 3600 are presented, including incremental copying garbage collection, approximately depth-first copying, ephemeral objects, tagged architecture, and hardware assists. We discuss techniques for improving the efficiency of garbage collection by recognizing that objects in the Lisp world have a variety of lifetimes. The importance of designing the architecture and the hardware to facilitate garbage collection is stressed.

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Cited By

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Yang YWu MChen HZang BBarbalace ABhatotia PAlvisi LCadar C(2021)Bridging the performance gap for copy-based garbage collectors atop non-volatile memoryProceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3447786.3456246(343-358)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3447786.3456246
Jang JHeo JLee YWon JKim SJung SJang HHam TLee J(2019)CharonProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358297(726-739)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3352460.3358297
Bruno RFerreira P(2018)A Study on Garbage Collection Algorithms for Big Data EnvironmentsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/315681851:1(1-35)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3156818
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Index Terms

Garbage collection in a large LISP system
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Other architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Garbage collection

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LFP '84: Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming

August 1984

364 pages

ISBN:0897911423

DOI:10.1145/800055

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 August 1984

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Cited By

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Yang YWu MChen HZang BBarbalace ABhatotia PAlvisi LCadar C(2021)Bridging the performance gap for copy-based garbage collectors atop non-volatile memoryProceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3447786.3456246(343-358)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3447786.3456246
Jang JHeo JLee YWon JKim SJung SJang HHam TLee J(2019)CharonProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358297(726-739)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3352460.3358297
Bruno RFerreira P(2018)A Study on Garbage Collection Algorithms for Big Data EnvironmentsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/315681851:1(1-35)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3156818
Tsai PGan YSanchez DOskin MInoue K(2018)Rethinking the memory hierarchy for modern languagesProceedings of the 51st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1109/MICRO.2018.00025(203-216)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MICRO.2018.00025
Patrício DBruno RSimão JFerreira PVeiga L(2017)Locality-Aware GC Optimisations for Big Data WorkloadsOn the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2017 Conferences10.1007/978-3-319-69459-7_4(50-67)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69459-7_4
Chlipala A(2015)From Network Interface to Multithreaded Web ApplicationsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775051.267700350:1(609-622)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775051.2677003
Gu RKoenig JRamananandro TShao ZWu XWeng SZhang HGuo Y(2015)Deep Specifications and Certified Abstraction LayersACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775051.267697550:1(595-608)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775051.2676975
Bacon DCheng PShukla S(2014)Parallel real-time garbage collection of multiple heaps in reconfigurable hardwareACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775049.260299649:11(117-127)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775049.2602996
Bacon DCheng PShukla SGrove DGuyer S(2014)Parallel real-time garbage collection of multiple heaps in reconfigurable hardwareProceedings of the 2014 international symposium on Memory management10.1145/2602988.2602996(117-127)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2602988.2602996
Bacon DCheng PRajan V(2013)POPL 2003ACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2502508.250252348:4S(58-71)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2502508.2502523
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