Generation Scavenging

David Ungar
1984 Software engineering notes  
Many interactive computing environmencs provide automatic storage reclamation and virtual memory to ease the burden of managing storage. Unfortunately, many storage reclams~tion algorithms impede interaction with distracting pauses. Generation Scavenging is a reclamation algorithm that has no noticeable pauses, eliminates page faults for transient objects, compacts objects without resorting to indirection, and reclaims circular structures, in one third the time of traditional approaches. We
more » ... incorporated Generation Scaveng. int. in Berkeley Smalltalk (BS), our Smalltalk-80* implementation, and instrumented it to obtain performance data. We are also designing a microprocessor with hardware support for Generation Scavenging.
doi:10.1145/390010.808261 fatcat:koezi452nfdstid3u5okxlqcci