Felix presented Regional Garbage Collection at the Scheme Workshop 2009. The 20 minute presentation was barely enough time to present the design ideas. The paper provides:
Regional garbage collection offers a useful compromise between real-time and generational collection. Regional collectors resemble generational collectors, but are scalable: our main theorem guarantees a positive lower bound, independent of mutator and live storage, for the theoretical worst-case minimum mutator utilization (MMU). The theorem also establishes fixed upper bounds for space usage and collection pauses.
Standard generational collectors are not scalable. Some real-time collectors are scalable, while others assume a well-behaved mutator or provide no worst-case guarantees at all.
Regional collectors cannot compete with hard real-time collectors at millisecond resolutions, but offer efficiency comparable to contemporary generational collectors combined with improved latency and MMU at resolutions on the order of hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds.
Presentation slides: klock-rgc-schemeworkshop-2009-slides.pdf.
The paper (preprint version): William D Clinger and Felix S Klock II. Scalable Garbage Collection with Guaranteed MMU. In the Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, Northeastern University, 22 August 2009, pages 14-25.
Last updated 9 September 2009.