A Lifetime-based Garbage Collector for LISP Systems on General-Purpose Computers

Abstract

Garbage collector performance in LISP systems on custom hardware has been substantially improved by the adoption of lifetime-based garbage collection techniques. To date, however, successful lifetime-based garbage collectors have required special-purpose hardware, or at least privileged access to data structures maintained by the virtual memory system. I present here a lifetime-based garbage collector requiring no special-purpose hardware or virtual memory system support, and discuss its performance.