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Memory reclamation techniques have been studied for forty years---in
fact, since the first implementations of the Lisp programming
language. For this reason, the literature in this area is enormous.
A comprehensive reference is Jones' book [Jon98]. Paul Wilson's tutorial [Wil92] is an excellent introduction to the field, with many references. The following web pages also provide a good view of the state of the art in memory management.
is an introduction to sequential garbage collectors.
contains the presentation of [Jon98] and includes a
large searchable bibliography.
lists different tools for debugging garbage collection.
offers C source code for a conservative garbage collector for the C
language. This garbage collector replaces the classical allocator
malloc by a specialized version GC_malloc. Explicit
recovery by free is replaced by a new version that no longer does
maintains a list of links on this subject.
In chapter 12 on the interface between C and Objective CAML we come
back to memory management.