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"Programmation fonctionnelle : Le glaneur des cellules centralisé et sa généralisation dans les environnements répartis"

Tayeb Lemlouma, Mai 2000.

Abstract

Different manner can be used to guarantee memory space collection in functional language and even in O.O languages. Garbage collection ( the process of reclaiming storage that has been allocated by a client program, but is no longer accessible by following pointers from program variables ) can be done by various algorithms. Distributed systems, which are characterized by a growing number of applications that communicate solely by exchanging messages, require new concepts which must be suitable for distributed environment and should take into account all the characteristics of theses environments. Our paper discuss two main ideas : first the implementation and the evaluation of the "Mark then Sweep" garbage collection technique in a centralized system, then we discuss basic ideas of the implementation of the garbage module in a distributed environment. We introduce new manner to generalize the garbage collection in a system constituted by more than one computation unity. We propose a protocol ( based on the atomic commit protocol called : 2PC) which guarantees the distributed memory collection, and we give also, a solution to avoid the protocol blocking if some system failures occur.

Key-words

Garbage collector, functional language, distributed system.

Please send your comments to Tayeb.Lemlouma@inrialpes.fr