Generational Cyclic Reference Counting

In this paper, we introduce the concept of the age of a cell to cyclic reference counting. Lifetime figures vary from language to language and program to program, but usually between 80 to 98 percent of all newly-allocated objects die within a few million instructions, or before another megabyte has been allocated. The majority of objects die even younger, within tens of kilobytes of allocation. Age information brings the advantage of selecting the youngest cell in the queue, increasing the likelihood of running mark-scan on garbage cells. We also use the age information as a way of detecting the existence of cycles during the mark phase. This information allows the algorithm to perform the scan phase more efficiently. (Submitted to Information Processing Letters)