Reddit reviews Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management

If you want more than an overview:

https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Management-Algorithms/dp/1420082795

Or, if you're on a budget, the previous edition can be had for under $20 used:

https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-Automatic-Management/dp/0471941484

What can be even cheaper is to pick a recent GC paper (e.g. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~speedway/fp031-kermany.pdf) and then follow the citations back in time. Often if you google the author and the name of the paper, you'll find a .edu hit on the first page of google that has the paper as a PDF for free (either the author(s) themselves host it, or a professor teaching a class posted it for their students to read).

For basic background, read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheney's_algorithm

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_garbage_collection#Basic_algorithm

As Cheney's algorithm and tri-color marking are two of the basic building blocks for many other GC algorithms.

Unlike some other topics in CS, garbage-collection papers tend to not invent their own mathematical notations for describing their algorithms, and they tend to be more empirically focused (since worst-case bounds on most novel GC algorithms are not particularly interesting). Those two things make the papers quite approachable.

No, a conservative non-generational GC is not "decent".

Step 1. Buy this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-Automatic-Management/dp/0471941484/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239472447&sr=8-1

Step 2. Implement a decent GC (look at Ocaml, Sun JVM, or SBCL for examples)

Step 3. Post on social networking sites telling people about MRI's "decent" GC

Hopefully a book that has a high utility but low incidence of suggestion:

Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management

I had been writing garbage collectors for a year or so before getting this book, and it really changed the way I think about resource allocation on a computer. It's a topic that I don't think is as broadly applicable as some of your other suggestions, yet it's one which turns out to be applicable for a wide variety of problems--it teaches a certain class of patterns that you can use even if you never write a garbage collector.

> of course. except that c++ allows you to use values that are stack-allocated and unboxed whenever you wish for it. (which should really be the vast majority of the time. one notable exception are standard containers, but if you're writing your own container library, your programming license needs to be revoked anyways.)

But you just showed us the use of an auto_ptr to get past GC problems. They manage heap objects.

> this is orders of magnitude better than copying gigabytes of tiny, fragmented, heap-allocated objects for each garbage collection pass, trust me.

Generational collection.

Here's a great book. Expensive as hell, though.