Garbage collection of actors

  • Authors:
  • Dennis Kafura;Doug Washabaugh;Jeff Nelson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA;Digital Equipment Corporation, tay2-2/b4, 153 Taylor Street, Littleton, MA;Digital Equipment Corporation, ZKO2-3/N30, 110 Spitbrook Road, Nashua, NH

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA/ECOOP '90 Proceedings of the European conference on object-oriented programming on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

This paper considers the garbage collection of concurrent objects for which it is necessary to know not only “reachability,” the usual criterion for reclaiming data, but also the “state” (active or blocked) of the object. For the actor model, a more comprehensive definition than previously available is given for reclaimable actors. Two garbage collection algorithms, implementing a set of “coloring” rules, are presented and their computational complexity is analyzed. Extensions are briefly described to allow incremental, concurrent, distributed and real-time collection. It is argued that the techniques used for the actor model applies to other object-based concurrent models.