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The book Garbage Collection: Algorithms and Implementations has been making the rounds recently, and since I’ve always been curious about how GC actually works under the hood, I’ve been chewing through it bit by bit. I can only say I’ve stumbled through most of it so far — for the implementation half I read just the Python chapter; the parts on the Dalvik VM, Rubinius, and V8 I skipped, mostly because I haven’t gone deep enough on JavaScript or Ruby to make those readings worthwhile. I think you only get value out of a language’s GC implementation when you also understand the language’s own semantics. This post is just a summary of the main takeaways.
Key concepts
I haven’t expanded the implementation half in the mind map either — I’ll come back to it once I’m more familiar with Ruby and JavaScript.
