A garbage collector for the concurrent real-time language erlang

Abstract

Garbage collection is currently used in many different types of systems, both for high-level languages like ML and Prolog which traditionally have always had implicit memory management, and for languages like C++ which until recently have only had explicit memory management. However garbage collection is seldom used in real-time systems. This paper describes the implementation of a real-time garbage collector for the programming language Erlang. Erlang is a language that has been designed to program large concurrent robust fault-tolerant realtime systems. We describe how the memory management system for Erlang is implemented and show how the needs of the Erlang language, and the systems in which it is being used, are handled by the collector.