Real-time concurrent collection on stock multiprocessors

The use of concurrent garbage collection for Digital Equipment Corp.'s experimental shared-memory multiprocessors, the firefly was discussed. The garbage collection is basically a graph traversal, which can be depth-first or breadth-first search. It is stated that the concurrent and generational collector design can be decomposed into two separate subproblems. The subproblems can be to design an algorithm that uses read barriers and write barriers and devising tricks for implementating the barriers.