Lazy Cyclic Reference Counting

Rafael Dueire Lins (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil)

Abstract: Reference counting is a widely employed memory management technique, in which garbage collection operations are interleaved with computation. Standard reference counting has the major drawback of being unable to handle cyclic structures. This paper presents an important optimisation to a recently published algorithm for cyclic reference counting. Proofs of the correctness of the original and lazy algorithms are provided, together with performance figures.

Keywords: cycles, garbage collection, memory management, reference counting

Categories: D.4.2, D.4.3, F.2.2