Making garbage collection independent of the amount of garbage

Abstract

(Appendix to SICS Research Report R86009) This appendix shows in detail how to make the time for the garbage collection algorithm presented in [AHS 86] become proportional to n log n , where n is the number of non-garbage cells. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with [AHS 86] since no further presentation of the notation used is made here. The compaction phase of that algorithm is proportional to the amount of memory, i.e. proportional to the sum of garbage and non-garbage. This is unfortunate since for instance a garbage collection using copying is just proportional to the amount of non-garbage. If a program generates much more garbage than non-garbage, it might be a severe drawback of a garbage collection algorithm to depend on the amount of garbage. This paper shows how to make the garbage collection in [AHS] independent of the amount of garbage