The Garbage Collection Handbook returns: a 60-year survey of automatic memory management

The second edition of The Garbage Collection Handbook updates Richard Jones and colleagues’ definitive reference on automatic memory management, succeeding the 1996 original and the 2012 first edition. It consolidates roughly six decades of research and engineering into one framework, comparing classic algorithms alongside modern parallel, incremental, concurrent, and real-time collectors, typically presented through pseudocode and diagrams.

The revision responds to how much harder memory management has become as hardware and runtime environments evolved. Beyond the core algorithms, it digs into production-grade commercial collectors and the awkward but critical boundary between a collector and its runtime system. The new edition adds over 90 pages, including fresh chapters on persistence and energy-aware collection, and an e-book version threaded with more than 37,000 hyperlinks across chapters, algorithms, figures, and original papers.

The practical pitch is that garbage collection is now nearly universal across mainstream languages, so understanding how collectors actually behave is no longer optional for serious programmers — it directly informs which collector to pick and how to tune it. The work is backed by an online bibliographic database of nearly 3,400 GC-related publications, searchable on the web or downloadable as BibTeX, PostScript, or PDF.