Garbage collection of actors

Abstract

This paper considers the garbage collection of concurrent objects for which it is necessary to know not only “reachability,” the usual criterion for reclaiming data, but also the “state” (active or blocked) of the object. For the actor model, a more comprehensive definition than previously available is given for reclaimable actors. Two garbage collection algorithms, implementing a set of “coloring” rules, are presented and their computational complexity is analyzed. Extensions are briefly described to allow incremental, concurrent, distributed and real-time collection. It is argued that the techniques used for the actor model applies to other object-based concurrent models .