To see a benefit from generational garbage collection, you need a lot of mature data in the heap of your test case. If there's not a big difference between a fu

To see a benefit from generational garbage collection, you need a lot of mature data in the heap of your test case. If there's not a big difference between a full traversal and a partial traversal, the benefit won't be realized. I suspect it's a huge win in most modern manage application settings, because application images are huge with a lot of cruft in them. If your algorithm is churning away allocating lots of temporary objects, and it's sitting in the middle of a behemoth image, generational GC is a big win. In dynamic languages, the functions themselves are objects that can be garbage collected and the function bindings have to be traversed in a full GC. It functions rarely change. Quickly recede into the mature generation. You can investigate generational vs simple mark-and-sweep with my TXR Lisp. At compile time you can configurate to disable generational GC. This is not being regularly tested but I did check it for regressions fairly recently. It is not a copying collector. Objects stay where they are. The nursery is just a global array of pointers. There are two other arrays that help with the old pointing to young mutation. Resetting these arrays costs almost nothing: we just set their fill indices to zero. You can easily tune their sizes and there's a configuration for a small memory which changes several defaults at the same time.