Chapter Overview
This chapter presents dynamic memory allocation strategies and garbage
collection algorithms, in particular the one used by Objective CAML which is a
combination of the presented algorithms. The first section provides
background on different classes of memory and their characteristics.
The second section describes memory allocation and compares implicit and
explicit deallocation. The third section presents the major GC
algorithms. The fourth section details Objective CAML's algorithm. The fifth
section uses the Gc module to control the heap. The sixth
section introduces the use of weak pointers from the
Weak module to implement caches.