Smalltalk-80: bits of history, words of advice
Smalltalk-80: bits of history, words of advice
Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation
Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation
CLU reference manual
Communications of the ACM
A model and stack implementation of multiple environments
Communications of the ACM
Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system
POPL '84 Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages
An efficient environment allocation scheme in an interpreter for a lexically-scoped LISP
LFP '80 Proceedings of the 1980 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
Implementation strategies for continuations
LFP '88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
Lazy task creation: a technique for increasing the granularity of parallel programs
LFP '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
CONS should not CONS its arguments, or, a lazy alloc is a smart alloc
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
The treadmill: real-time garbage collection without motion sickness
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
A comparative performance evaluation of write barrier implementation
OOPSLA '92 conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
Implementation Strategies for First-Class Continuations
Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
Lazy Task Creation: A Technique for Increasing the Granularity of Parallel Programs
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
The Smalltalk programming language allows contexts (stack frames) to be accessed and manipulated in very general ways. This sometimes requires that contexts be retained even after they have terminated executing, and that they be reclaimed other than by LIFO stack discipline. The authoritative definition of Smalltalk [Goldberg and Robson 83] uses reference counting garbage collection to manage contexts, an approach found to be inadequate in practice [Krasner, et al. 83]. Deutsch and Schiffman have described a technique that uses an actual stack as much as possible [Deutsch and Schiffman 84]. Here we offer a less complex technique that we expect will have lower total overhead and reclaim many frames sooner and more easily. We are implementing our technique as part of a state of the art Smalltalk interpreter. The approach may apply to other languages that allow indefinite lifetimes for execution contexts, be they interpreted or compiled.