Seminar: Garbage Collection SS 2013

Abstract

Several mainstream programming languages and virtually all scripting languages offer garbage collection: a runtime facility, which identifies and reclaims memory blocks that are no longer used by the currently executing program. Still, there are many myths and prejudices concerning the overhead and shortcomings of garbage collection.

This seminar offers a sound overview of the most important approaches to garbage collection, their properties and their requirements:

• algorithms to find and to deallocate unused storage
• trade-offs between memory overhead and impact on execution time
• assumptions concerning the memory allocation behavior of typical programs
• suitability for interactive or real-time environments
• dependence on supporting information provided by the compiler or runtime system of the language

You will get a deeper insight into the principles and inner workings of different variants of garbage collection. This will enable you to make an informed decision, when designing the memory management for a programming language implementation or for some software system. Understanding garbage collection is also helpful, to effectively program in an existing language that employs automatic memory management.

Prerequisites:

We assume basic knowledge on programming languages, especially runtime stacks and scopes of variable definitions, as taught in the lecture "Grundlagen der Programmiersprachen". Deeper knowledge in this area from the lectures like "Programming Languages and Compilers" or "Compilation Methods" is very useful.

Organizational matters:

• Dates for oral presentations:

  • Wed July 17, 09:00 to 12:00 in F0.225 (3 presentations)
  • Thu July 18, 14:00 to 17:00 in F2.211 (3 presentations)

• Seminar number in PAUL: L.079.08002
• Masters module: III.1.2 Languages and Programming Methods, III.1.6 Constructive Methods in Software Engineering
• Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens, Dr. Michael Thies
• credits (ECTS points): 4
• Tentative Topics and Initial References:

  1. Introduction and Variants of Garbage Collection
     not assigned
     Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  2. Reference-Counting Garbage Collection
     Assigned to: Ullah
     Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  3. Mark and Sweep Garbage Collection
     Assigned to: Maicher
     Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  4. Copying Garbage Collection
     not assigned
     Supervised by: Dr. Michael Thies

  5. Incremental Garbage Collection
     not assigned
     Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  6. Concurrent Garbage Collection
     not assigned
     Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  7. Real-Time Garbage Collection
     Assigned to: Sieker
     Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  8. Conservative or Accurate Garbage Collection
     not assigned
     Supervised by: Dr. Michael Thies

  9. Performance Issues of Garbage Collection
     Assigned to: Vogel
     Supervised by: Dr. Michael Thies

  10. Cycle Collection
      not assigned
      Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Uwe Kastens

  11. Java Memory Model
      Assigned to: Niebusch
      Supervised by: Dr. Michael Thies

  12. Leak Detection and Garbage Collection
      Assigned to: Sureka
      Supervised by: Dr. Michael Thies

  13. Dynamic Analysis for Leak Detection
      not assigned
      Supervised by: Dr. Michael Thies

  Download Topics with References as PDF

• You have to send a first version of your seminar paper to your supervisor until July 1

• The slides from the second meeting are available as a PDF document:
  Guidelines for Working on a Scientific Seminar

• Hints for presentations and seminar reports
  • by Peter Pfahler (unfortunately in german)
  • by Prof. Karl (unfortunately in german, but with some links to english documents)
  • by Prof. Lutz Wegner (unfortunately in german), especially Section 1.7 on citing sources correctly
  • How to give a good research talk
• Anyone who would like to write the seminar paper with LaTeX should use the following template:
  • Template-File (that's a patched version of the OASIcs series template, OASIcs manual)
  • Sample LaTeX file for your paper
  • In order to create a list of references, please use BiBTeX.