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33 - GARBAGE COLLECTION REVEALED

Smalltalk Report, February, 1995

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Kent Beck
Affiliation:
First Class Software, Inc.
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Summary

This column is the site of my greatest disaster as a column writer—I promised something I didn't deliver. This was another one of those “write the first half now and the rest later” columns. Unlike the column about applying patterns to design, however, I didn't know the second half of the material when I started. I stil feel bad about this, but I still don't know the material for the second half, so I still can't write it

I really like this column as a piece of pedagogy. It is an excellent example of lie management. I describe garbage collection simply one way, then simply another, then combine the two for a truer picture of garbage collection. And hey, I even included a bunch of pictures.

This month I'll talk about garbage collection. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everybody talks about the garbage collector, but nobody does anything about it. All of the commercial Smalltalks provide some ability to tune the garbage collector, but without knowing what's going on and why, you are unlikely to be able to know when these features are applicable or how to use them. This article discusses the common vocabulary of modern garbage collection. Later, we'll explore what you can do to tune the garbage collector in the various Smalltalks.

Type
Chapter
Information
Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
A Sorted Collection
, pp. 311 - 322
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • GARBAGE COLLECTION REVEALED
  • Kent Beck, First Class Software, Inc.
  • Book: Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574979.036
Available formats
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  • GARBAGE COLLECTION REVEALED
  • Kent Beck, First Class Software, Inc.
  • Book: Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574979.036
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • GARBAGE COLLECTION REVEALED
  • Kent Beck, First Class Software, Inc.
  • Book: Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574979.036
Available formats
×