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

216 points by teleforce

by piinbinary

0 subcomment

I have this book and like it.
I also wish there was a book that guided you through the process of implementing a language with accurate garbage collection, similar to how Crafting Interpreters teaches you to implement a language. Perhaps it could start with a shadow stack + simple mark-and-sweep and then move on to stack maps + generational GC.

by pdevr

2 subcomments

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.

by orionblastar

3 subcomments

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

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

Previously:
Dec 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357870
Apr 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492307

0 subcomment

by kevinten10

0 subcomment

by rayiner

4 subcomments

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

by hamstergene

4 subcomments

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.