Indeed - information about good garbage collectors is readily available. Paul R. Wilson's "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu

Indeed - information about good garbage collectors is readily available. Paul R. Wilson's "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.47.2438 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.47.2...) is an excellent survey, and Jones, Hosking, and Moss's _The Garbage Collection Handbook_ is an excellent reference. (The previous book by Jones and Lins is also great, but the new one adds important material on concurrent GCs, real-time GC, and interactions between the GC and runtime systems.) As an exercise, I wrote a simple standalone mark-bit-page & lazy sweeping garbage collector for C. (https://github.com/silentbicycle/oscar https://github.com/silentbicycle/oscar) Marking occurs in a user-provided callback, since I don't assume any particular data structure. It's only ~300 LOC.