Automatic, incremental, on-the-fly garbage collection of actors

Garbage collection is an important topic of research for operating systems, because applications are easier to write and maintain if they are unburdened by the concerns of storage management. The actor computation model is another important topic: it is a powerful, expressive model of concurrent computation. This thesis is motivated by the need for an actor garbage collector for a distributed real-time system under development by the Real-Time Systems Group at Virginia Tech.

It is shown that traditional garbage collectors—even those that operate on computational objects—are not sufficient for actors. Three algorithms, with varying degrees of efficiency, are presented as solutions to the actor garbage collection problem. The correctness and execution complexity of the algorithms is derived. Implementation methods are explored, and directions for future research are proposed.