Feasibility of Automatic Storage Reclamation with Concurrent Program Execution in a LISP Environment.

摘要

Storage reclamation is the process of reclaiming discarded information and returning the memory space occupied by that discarded information to an available area or list in memory that is available to be utilized by programmers. This increased interest in storage reclamation is a result of the increasing use of list-processing environments. A list-processing environment is a system in which the language manipulates data structures called lists. In classical LISP implementations, program execution/computation continues until there is no more memory available (i.e., the free list of available cells has become exhausted). When this happens, user program(s) HALT and then storage reclamation, in the form of garbage collection, takes over. This halting of programs in the midst of their computation is not only frustrating to programmers and researchers but can also be of crucial importance in other applications. This thesis investigates the feasibility of allowing concurrent program execution with garbage collection. LISP has been selected because it has been estimated that typical LISP programs take 10%-30% of their processing time to perform garbage collection. Keywords: Parallel processing: Algorithms.