The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2nd Ed) (2023)

pdevr•about 4 hours ago

I had the 2012 print edition. One of the best books available - the best book that I knew - about GC at that time.

Anti-pattern: Regarding the 2023 e-book edition, I do not see a way to buy it from the site, or even a link to buy.

Jtsummers•about 3 hours ago

I thought I was missing something but figured they just didn't have a link to purchase it. I ended up going to the publisher's site to track it down:

https://www.routledge.com/The-Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Th...

hamstergene•about 4 hours ago

What I didn’t like about this series of books was choosing “garbage collection” as umbrella term for both tracing GC and reference counting, without verifying if programming community would agree with that, which turned out they didn’t.

I’ve seen a lot of threads here and on reddit where people were arguing about terminology purely because of this book alone.

By that definition, C++ code has garbage collection if it uses std::shared_ptr, going against widespread common usage of the term “garbage collected programming language” which specifically contrasts manual languages like C++ or Rust against garbage collected ones.

“Automatic Memory Management” is a lot more suitable description to what programmers have to do to manage memory; it is now in the title but still hasn’t become the primary term.

pron•about 3 hours ago

> What I didn’t like about this series of books was choosing “garbage collection” as umbrella term for both tracing GC and reference counting, without verifying if programming community would agree with that, which turned out they didn’t.

This has been the standard terminology in memory management research for many decades. The only programmers who don't like it are those who don't understand the principles of memory management.

> By that definition, C++ code has garbage collection if it uses std::shared_ptr

That's right.

> going against widespread common usage of the term “garbage collected programming language” which specifically contrasts manual languages like C++ or Rust against garbage collected ones.

Since this contrast mostly exists in the minds of people who don't understand memory management, going against this common misconception is good. That's not to say that there aren't some interesting tradeoffs that often align with the colloquial perception, "garbage collection" isn't the interesting part. As you said, both C++ and Rust use GC; in fact, they use a GC somewhat similar to the one used by CPython.

gdwatson•about 2 hours ago

This reminds me a bit of the way academics in programming language theory internalized the type-theoretic definition of the word “type” over and against the traditional programming definition. You sometimes see people who try to correct the term “dynamically typed language,” which makes perfect sense when types are data types, to “untyped” or “unityped,” which makes sense when types are mathematical constructs equivalent to proofs.

The colloquial term is clear in context, and it draws its boundaries in useful places. If academia prefers other boundaries to simplify its formal definitions, that’s understandable. But the rest of us shouldn’t restrict our language in that way.

trumpdong•about 4 hours ago

The Linux kernel has garbage collection, and not just the controversial refcount kind.

rayiner•about 4 hours ago

How good are AIs at coding manual memory management? Is this a sea change in automatic memory management?

mtklein•about 4 hours ago

I have never seen Codex or Claude get manual memory management wrong. I used to be pretty fastidious about using leak sanitizer or other such tools to catch my own memory management issues, and while not quite useless, that sort of testing has dropped way down my list of worries the more I lean on LLMs. I am constantly surprised by how many formerly tedious or error prone tasks stopped being either of those, and I expect to see practice shift away from middle-safe languages like C++ to not just much more safe languages like Rust but surprisingly also to much less safe ones like C and platform specific assembly.

ChrisArchitect•about 3 hours ago

Previously:

Dec 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357870

Apr 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492307

orionblastar•about 6 hours ago

I remember reading it before. My son threw it away when we moved houses, not knowing how important it was. I'd recommend it.

tikhonj•about 5 hours ago

Ironic that this of all books got garbage collected prematurely.

travisgriggs•about 5 hours ago

Q: what kind of collection is this real world example illustrating?

A: Copying Garbage Collector (semi space). Chapter 4!

Great book. I was always fascinated by bakers treadmill. Always wanted a real world case where I could implement one with Fibonacci sized mills.

The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2nd Ed) (2023)

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