Shifgrethor II: Notes on tracing garbage collectors

Posted on October 22, 2018 by woboats@gmail.com (boats)

In the previous post I said that in the second post in the series we’d talk about how rooting works. However, as I sat down to write that post, I realized that it would be a good idea to back up and give an initial overview of how a tracing garbage collector works - and in particular, how the underlying garbage collector in shifgrethor is implemented. In the abstract, we can think of the memory of a Rust program with garbage collection as being divided into three sections: the stack, the “unmanaged” heap, and the “managed” heap.