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The Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector can be used as a garbage collecting replacement for C malloc or C++ new. It allows you to allocate memory basically as you normally would, without explicitly deallocating memory that is no longer useful. The collector automatically recycles memory when it determines that it can no longer be otherwise accessed. A simple example of such a use is given here.
The collector is also used by a number of programming language implementations that either use C as intermediate code, want to facilitate easier interoperation with C libraries, or just prefer the simple collector interface. For a more detailed description of the interface, see here.
Alternatively, the garbage collector may be used as a leak detector for C or C++ programs, though that is not its primary goal.
Typically several versions will be available. Usually you should first try to use gc_source/gc.tar.gz, which is normally an older, more stable version.
If that fails, try the latest explicitly numbered version in gc_source/. Later versions may contain additional features, platform support, or bug fixes, but are likely to be less well tested. Note that versions containing the letters alpha are even less well tested than others, especially on non-HP platforms.
A slightly older version of the garbage collector is now also included as part of the GNU compiler distribution. The source code for that version is available for browsing here.
The arguments for and against conservative garbage collection in C and C++ are briefly discussed in issues.html. The beginnings of a frequently-asked-questions list are here.
The garbage collector code is copyrighted by Hans-J. Boehm, Alan J. Demers, Xerox Corporation, Silicon Graphics, and Hewlett-Packard Company. It may be used and copied without payment of a fee under minimal restrictions. See the README file in the distribution or the license for more details. IT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. ANY USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Empirically, this collector works with most unmodified C programs, simply by replacing malloc with GC_malloc calls, replacing realloc with GC_realloc calls, and removing free calls. Exceptions are discussed in issues.html.
Irix pthreads, Linux threads, Win32 threads, Solaris threads (old style and pthreads), HP/UX 11 pthreads, Tru64 pthreads, and MacOS X threads are supported in recent versions.
Precompiled versions of the collector for NetBSD are available here or here.
Debian Linux includes prepackaged versions of the collector.
For an overview of the implementation, see here.
The garbage collector distribution includes a C string (cord) package that provides for fast concatenation and substring operations on long strings. A simple curses- and win32-based editor that represents the entire file as a cord is included as a sample application.
Performance of the nonincremental collector is typically competitive with malloc/free implementations. Both space and time overhead are likely to be only slightly higher for programs written for malloc/free (see Detlefs, Dosser and Zorn's Memory Allocation Costs in Large C and C++ Programs.) For programs allocating primarily very small objects, the collector may be faster; for programs allocating primarily large objects it will be slower. If the collector is used in a multithreaded environment and configured for thread-local allocation, it may in some cases significantly outperform malloc/free allocation in time.
We also expect that in many cases any additional overhead will be more than compensated for by decreased copying etc. if programs are written and tuned for garbage collection.
The following provide information on garbage collection in general:
Paul Wilson's garbage collection ftp archive and GC survey.
The Ravenbrook Memory Management Reference.
David Chase's GC FAQ.
Richard Jones' GC page and his book.
The following papers describe the collector algorithms we use and the underlying design decisions at a higher level.
(Some of the lower level details can be found here.)
The first one is not available electronically due to copyright considerations. Most of the others are subject to ACM copyright.
Boehm, H., "Dynamic Memory Allocation and Garbage Collection", Computers in Physics 9, 3, May/June 1995, pp. 297-303. This is directed at an otherwise sophisticated audience unfamiliar with memory allocation issues. The algorithmic details differ from those in the implementation. There is a related letter to the editor and a minor correction in the next issue.
Boehm, H., and M. Weiser, "Garbage Collection in an Uncooperative Environment", Software Practice & Experience, September 1988, pp. 807-820.
Boehm, H., A. Demers, and S. Shenker, "Mostly Parallel Garbage Collection", Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '91 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, SIGPLAN Notices 26, 6 (June 1991), pp. 157-164.
Boehm, H., "Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection", Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '93 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, SIGPLAN Notices 28, 6 (June 1993), pp. 197-206.
Boehm, H., "Reducing Garbage Collector Cache Misses", Proceedings of the 2000 International Symposium on Memory Management . Official version. Technical report version. Describes the prefetch strategy incorporated into the collector for some platforms. Explains why the sweep phase of a "mark-sweep" collector should not really be a distinct phase.
M. Serrano, H. Boehm, "Understanding Memory Allocation of Scheme Programs", Proceedings of the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, 2000, Montreal, Canada, pp. 245-256. Official version. Earlier Technical Report version. Includes some discussion of the collector debugging facilities for identifying causes of memory retention.
Boehm, H., "Fast Multiprocessor Memory Allocation and Garbage Collection", HP Labs Technical Report HPL 2000-165. Discusses the parallel collection algorithms, and presents some performance results.
Boehm, H., "Bounding Space Usage of Conservative Garbage Collectors", Proceeedings of the 2002 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Jan. 2002, pp. 93-100. Official version. Technical report version. Includes a discussion of a collector facility to much more reliably test for the potential of unbounded heap growth.
The following papers discuss language and compiler restrictions necessary to guaranteed safety of conservative garbage collection.
We thank John Levine and JCLT for allowing us to make the second paper available electronically, and providing PostScript for the final version.
Boehm, H., ``Simple Garbage-Collector-Safety'', Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '96 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.
Boehm, H., and D. Chase, ``A Proposal for Garbage-Collector-Safe C Compilation'', Journal of C Language Translation 4, 2 (Decemeber 1992), pp. 126-141.
Other related information:
The Detlefs, Dosser and Zorn's Memory Allocation Costs in Large C and C++ Programs. This is a performance comparison of the Boehm-Demers-Weiser collector to malloc/free, using programs written for malloc/free.
Joel Bartlett's mostly copying conservative garbage collector for C++.
John Ellis and David Detlef's Safe Efficient Garbage Collection for C++ proposal.
Henry Baker's paper collection.
Slides for Hans Boehm's Allocation and GC Myths talk.
The runtime system for GCJ, the static GNU java compiler.
W3m, a text-based web browser.
Some versions of the Xerox DocuPrint printer software.
The Mozilla project, as leak detector.
The Mono project, an open source implementation of the .NET development framework.
The DotGNU Portable.NET project, another open source .NET implementation.
The Irssi IRC client.
The Berkeley Titanium project.
The NAGWare f90 Fortran 90 compiler.
Elwood Corporation's Eclipse Common Lisp system, C library, and translator.
The Bigloo Scheme and Camloo ML compilers written by Manuel Serrano and others.
Brent Benson's libscheme.
The MzScheme scheme implementation.
The University of Washington Cecil Implementation.
The Berkeley Sather implementation.
The Berkeley Harmonia Project.
The Toba Java Virtual Machine to C translator.
Macaulay 2, a system to support research in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra.
The Vesta configuration management system.
Asymptote LaTeX-compatible vector graphics language.
Description of alternate interfaces to the garbage collector.
Slides from an ISMM 2004 tutorial about the GC.
A FAQ (frequently asked questions) list.
How to use the garbage collector as a leak detector.
Some hints on debugging garbage collected applications.
An overview of the implementation of the garbage collector.
The data structure used for fast pointer lookups.
Scalability of the collector to multiprocessors.
Directory containing garbage collector source.
Mark-sweep versus copying garbage collectors and their complexity.
Pros and cons of conservative garbage collectors, in comparison to other collectors.
Issues related to garbage collection vs. manual memory management in C/C++.
Slide set discussing performance of nonmoving garbage collectors.
Slide set discussing Destructors, Finalizers, and Synchronization (POPL 2003).
Paper corresponding to above slide set. ( Technical Report version.)
A Java/Scheme/C/C++ garbage collection benchmark.
Slides for talk on memory allocation myths.
Slides for OOPSLA 98 garbage collection talk.
The archives for these lists appear here. The gc list archive may also be read at gmane.org.
Some prior discussion of the collector has taken place on the gcc java mailing list, whose archives appear here, and also on gclist@iecc.com.
Comments and bug reports may also be sent to (Hans.Boehm@hp.com) or (boehm@acm.org), but the gc mailing list is usually preferred.