Garbage Collection in Generic Libraries

This paper demonstrates a unified and grlrhage-collector independent way to describe the information required for precise collection. Thereby it is possible to construct a library that can be used with various garbage collectors, without modifying the code of the library or the collector itself. The library design preswnted applies the adaptor idiom of generic programming which guarantees no overhead incurred if the library is used with manual allocators or with garbage collectors that do not require programmer cooperation. As an illustration of our approach we provide sample adaptors for Bartlettʹs and CMM primary collectors. We also show that the Standard Template Library (STL) can be easily modified to become garbaage-collector aware.