The Garbage Collection Handbook

Glossary

A comprehensive glossary can also be found at http://www.memorymanagement.org.

ABA problem the inability of certain atomic operations to distinguish reading the same value twice from a memory location as ‘nothing changed’ versus some other thread changing the value after the first read and then changing it back before the second read.

accurate see type-accurate.

activation record a record that saves the state of computation and the return address of a method, sometimes called a frame.

address conventionally, a fixed-length unsigned integer representing the location of a datum in memory.

address space a set of addresses, physical or virtual, available to the program.

age-based collection a collection technique that partitions the heap ...