Garbage Collection
Garbage collection (the automatic reclamation of unused storage) was an important theme in the development of the Actor model.
In his doctoral dissertation, Peter Bishop developed an algorithm for garbage collection in distributed systems. Each system kept lists of links of pointers to and from other systems. Cyclic structures were collected by incrementally migrating Actors (objects) onto other systems which had their addresses until a cyclic structure was entirely contained in a single system where the garbage collector could recover the storage.
Henry Baker developed an algorithm for real-time garbage collection in his doctoral dissertation. The fundamental idea was to interleave collection activity with construction activity so that there would not have to be long pauses while collection takes place. See incremental garbage collection.
Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt developed a real time garbage collection based on the lifetimes of Actors (Objects). The fundamental idea was to allocate Actors (objects) in generations so that only the latest generations would have to be examined during a garbage collection. See generational garbage collection.
Read more about this topic: Actor Model Middle History
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