Starting with termination: a methodology for building distributed garbage collection algorithms

Abstract

We propose an effective methodology in which a distributed garbage collector may be derived from a distributed termination algorithm and a centralized garbage collector in a manner that preserves interesting properties of the original collector, such as completeness. To illustrate our technique we show how two distributed termination algorithms, credit recovery and task balancing, may be suitably described; and then map four centralized garbage collectors: reference counting; mark/scan; a generational scheme; and the Mature Object Space collector (MOS) onto this description. The advantage of our approach is that, by separating the issues of distribution and collection, we alleviate the difficulty of inventing, understanding, and comparing distributed garbage collection techniques.