Lecture

Garbage Collection in Object-Oriented Languages

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In course

CS-420: Advanced compiler construction

Students learn several implementation techniques for modern functional and object-oriented programming languages. They put some of them into practice by developing key parts of a compiler and run time system for a simple functional programming language. ...

Description

This lecture covers various garbage collection (GC) techniques in object-oriented languages. It starts with mostly-copying GC, which partitions objects into pinned and copied classes. Then, it delves into generational GC, which collects young and old generations separately to optimize memory usage. The lecture also discusses heap organization, hybrid heap management, promotion policies, and handling inter-generational pointers. Additionally, it explores finalizers, weak references, and challenges related to subtyping, polymorphism, object layout, and method dispatch in different inheritance scenarios.

Instructor

Michel Schinz

Teaching & PhD Courses Advanced compiler construction CS-420 Students learn several implementation techniques for modern functional and object-oriented programming languages. They put some of them into practice by developing key parts of a compiler and run time system for a simple functional programming language. Practice of object-oriented programming CS-108 Students improve their knowledge of Java and put it into practice by implementing a sizeable project. They learn how t

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Theoretical computer science

Programming language theory: High-level programming languages

Related concepts (32)

Polymorphism (computer science)

In programming language theory and type theory, polymorphism is the provision of a single interface to entities of different types or the use of a single symbol to represent multiple different types. The concept is borrowed from a principle in biology where an organism or species can have many different forms or stages. The most commonly recognized major classes of polymorphism are: Ad hoc polymorphism: defines a common interface for an arbitrary set of individually specified types.

Memory management

Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time. Several methods have been devised that increase the effectiveness of memory management.

Manual memory management

In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting.

Subtyping

In programming language theory, subtyping (also subtype polymorphism or inclusion polymorphism) is a form of type polymorphism in which a subtype is a datatype that is related to another datatype (the supertype) by some notion of substitutability, meaning that program elements, typically subroutines or functions, written to operate on elements of the supertype can also operate on elements of the subtype. If S is a subtype of T, the subtyping relation (written as S

Object-oriented programming

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and the code is in the form of procedures (often known as methods). A common feature of objects is that procedures (or methods) are attached to them and can access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually a special name such as or used to refer to the current object.

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