From: Andrew Thomas
Subject: Looking for books/docs on garbage collection techniques
Date: 
Message-ID: <ANDREWT.95Mar26134418@bonk.io.org>
Hello.  Does anybody have any suggestions for books, docs via FTP, 
journals or papers which talk about garbage collection techniques in
LISP?  I am implementing a LISP interpreter which appears to spend
between 30% and 80% of its run time in the garbage collection.  It
uses a mark-and-sweep algorithm (tried reference counting before, but
it was way too slow).  In many instances I believe that some form of
incremental garbage collection would work, but I am not really sure
how you can do that with mark-and-sweep.  Are there speedier
alternatives out there?

Thanks in advance
Andrew
--
Andrew Thomas - President, Sakura Software Inc.
Watch for SCADALisp - Real-time control and UI language for QNX/UNIX
For information, email ·······@io.org
From: Michael Callahan
Subject: Re: Looking for books/docs on garbage collection techniques
Date: 
Message-ID: <3l4o6h$blk@news.xmission.com>
Andrew Thomas (·······@bonk.io.org) wrote:

: Hello.  Does anybody have any suggestions for books, docs via FTP, 
: journals or papers which talk about garbage collection techniques in
: LISP?  I am implementing a LISP interpreter which appears to spend
: between 30% and 80% of its run time in the garbage collection.  It
: uses a mark-and-sweep algorithm (tried reference counting before, but
: it was way too slow).  In many instances I believe that some form of
: incremental garbage collection would work, but I am not really sure
: how you can do that with mark-and-sweep.  Are there speedier
: alternatives out there?

There are many papers available at ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage.
I recommend you start with bigsurv.ps, which is a 100+ page survey
on uniprocessor garbage collection techniques.

  Michael Callahan
http://www.xmisssion.com/~callahan