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Memory reclamation techniques have been studied for forty years---in
fact, since the first implementations of the Lisp programming
language. For this reason, the literature in this area is enormous.
A comprehensive reference is Jones' book [Jon98]. Paul Wilson's tutorial [Wil92] is an excellent introduction to the field, with many references. The following web pages also provide a good view of the state of the art in memory management.
Link
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html
is an introduction to sequential garbage collectors.
Link
http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html
contains the presentation of [Jon98] and includes a
large searchable bibliography.
Link
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~zorn/DSA.html
lists different tools for debugging garbage collection.
Link
http://reality.sgi.com/boehm_mti/
offers C source code for a conservative garbage collector for the C
language. This garbage collector replaces the classical allocator
malloc by a specialized version GC_malloc. Explicit
recovery by free is replaced by a new version that no longer does
anything.
Link
http://www.harlequin.com/mm/reference/links.html
maintains a list of links on this subject.
In chapter 12 on the interface between C and Objective CAML we come
back to memory management.