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Incremental copying garbage collection for WAM-based Prolog systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2007

RUBEN VANDEGINSTE  and
BART DEMOEN
RUBEN VANDEGINSTE
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven, Belgium (e-mail: ruben@cs.kuleuven.ac.be, bmd@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
BART DEMOEN
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven, Belgium (e-mail: ruben@cs.kuleuven.ac.be, bmd@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
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Abstract

The design and implementation of an incremental copying heap garbage collector for WAM-based Prolog systems is presented. Its heap layout consists of a number of equal-sized blocks. Other changes to the standard WAM allow these blocks to be garbage collected independently. The independent collection of heap blocks forms the basis of an incremental collecting algorithm which employs copying without marking (contrary to the more frequently used mark© or mark&slide algorithms in the context of Prolog). Compared to standard semi-space copying collectors, this approach to heap garbage collection lowers in many cases the memory usage and reduces pause times. The algorithm also allows for a wide variety of garbage collection policies including generational ones. The algorithm is implemented and evaluated in the context of hProlog.

Keywords

memory management of logic programming languagesincremental copying garbage collectionWAM based Prolog implementation
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 7 , Issue 5 , September 2007 , pp. 505 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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