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Making the world safe for garbage collection

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Susan OwickiAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '81: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 77 - 86

https://doi.org/10.1145/567532.567539

Published: 26 January 1981 Publication History

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Abstract

This paper describes the formal specifications of garbage collection in the programming language Cedar Mesa. They were developed as part of the process of identifying a safe subset of Mesa for which garbage collection was possible. The purpose of the specifications was to provide a precise definition of safety, along with criteria for checking the safety of proposed language features. Thus the specifications had to characterize the "invisibility" of the collector, as well as describe the services it provides. A beneficial effect of the specification effort was that the process of constructing the specifications led to a number of discoveries that improved the quality of the language.

References

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J. G. Mitchell et al., Mesa Language Manual, Report CSL-79-3, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, April, 1979.

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C. M. Geschke et al., "Early experience with Mesa," CACM 20:8 (Aug. 1977) pp. 540-553.

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L. P. Deutsch and D. G. Bobrow, "An efficient, incremental automatic garbage collector," CACM 19:9 (Sept. 1976), pp 522-526.

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H. Bekic and K. Walk, "On formalization of storage properties," in E. Engeler, editor, Semantics of Algorithmic Languages, Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol 188, 1971.

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K. Walk, "Modelling of storage properties of higher-level languages," International Journal of Computer and Information Sciences, 2:1 (March 1973) pp 1-24.

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G. Steele, Jr. "Multiprocessing compactifying garbage collection," CACM 18:9 (Sept. 1975), pp 495-509.

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E. W. Dijkstra et al., "On the fly garbage collection: an exercise in cooperation," CACM 21:11 (Nov. 1978), pp 966-971.

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D. Gries, "An exercise in proving parallel programs correct," CACM 20:12 (Dec. 1977), pp. 921-930.

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Swinehart DZellweger PBeach RHagmann R(1986)A structural view of the Cedar programming environmentACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/6465.64668:4(419-490)Online publication date: 1-Aug-1986
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/6465.6466
Swinehart DZellweger PHagmann RPayton TDeutsch L(1985)The structure of CedarProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 85 symposium on Language issues in programming environments10.1145/800225.806844(230-244)Online publication date: 25-Jun-1985
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806844
Swinehart DZellweger PHagmann R(1985)The structure of CedarACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/17919.80684420:7(230-244)Online publication date: 25-Jun-1985
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/17919.806844
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Making the world safe for garbage collection
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages

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Published In

POPL '81: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 1981

230 pages

ISBN:089791029X

DOI:10.1145/567532

Conference Chairs:
John White
University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut
,
Richard Lipton
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
,
Program Chair:
Patricia C. Goldberg
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 26 January 1981

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POPL '81 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 121 submissions, 20%;

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Swinehart DZellweger PBeach RHagmann R(1986)A structural view of the Cedar programming environmentACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/6465.64668:4(419-490)Online publication date: 1-Aug-1986
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/6465.6466
Swinehart DZellweger PHagmann RPayton TDeutsch L(1985)The structure of CedarProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 85 symposium on Language issues in programming environments10.1145/800225.806844(230-244)Online publication date: 25-Jun-1985
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806844
Swinehart DZellweger PHagmann R(1985)The structure of CedarACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/17919.80684420:7(230-244)Online publication date: 25-Jun-1985
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/17919.806844
Cohen J(1981)Garbage Collection of Linked Data StructuresACM Computing Surveys10.1145/356850.35685413:3(341-367)Online publication date: 1-Sep-1981
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356850.356854

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A Larch Specification of Copying Garbage Collection

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