

Teaching the Essentials of Garbage Collection - bazzargh
http://blog.brownplt.org/2013/02/19/teaching-gc.html

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aidenn0
That's actually pretty cool; I remember the joy when my own malloc/free ran
without crashing real-world programs; doing the same witha GC would be both
satisfying and a good way to find bugs.

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gliese1337
I've actually used this system as a student in a programming language design
class, in which we had to implement semispace and mark-and-sweep collectors. I
had the misfortune (unique in 2 sections of the class that semester) of
running into a bug in the framework, but I believe that got fixed, and it was
otherwise pretty dang cool.

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seivan
We used C++ to write a game and _SOMEHOW_ without knowing properly about how
GC worked - learned to write our own garbage collectors for projectiles that
went out of screen and enemies that died. :) It was basically the eye opener
for how GC's worked. Though I am sure it's faaaaaar more complicated than the
Sets we used to keep track. It still made me better at manually handling
memory.

That being said, I prefer GC and/or Automatic Reference Counting at compile
time. Still though, it was a nice "feeling" to manage your own memory in an
(incredibly small) project.

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malkia
"GC and/or Automatic Reference Counting at compile time" - What do you mean by
that?

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bennyg
He's probably talking about ARC for Objective-C, that automatically releases
references and allocations when it's impossible for those allocations to be
used again in scope.

~~~
seivan
Heh, I would have thought spelling the acronym out might be more clear than
just typing ARC.

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optiminimalist
That looks like a great tool! I recently took a class in programming language
design where we had to implement a simulated _Treadmill_ garbage collector
using a circular linked list in Java. It taught us the basics of how the
algorithm works but not really how it functions within the context of an
actual programming language implementation.

The proposed framework looks like it has a lot of potential.

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lifthrasiir
Brown PLT is jokingly said to do every programming language research unrelated
to the type theory (not saying the type theory is unimportant of course). I
hope to see more researches and directions like that.

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rayiner
This is really an awesome pedagogical tool.

