Ecological Memory Management

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Abstract

There’s too much garbage in the world already – we shouldn’t add more to it. We propose a new system for memory management that reuses and recycles whatever it can, and composts the remainder. The recycling centre salvages objects that would otherwise end up in the landfill of /dev/null, providing automated object pooling. And unlike compacting garbage collectors that merely squish things, our composting garbage collector actually converts garbage into entropy. We examine a variety of techniques for entropy generation within the compost heap. We explore practical implementations of our composting collector on current hardware, and point toward the possibilities afforded by future hardware designs. Finally, we show that with appropriate application of reuse, recycling, and composting, we can completely eliminate unwanted digital waste.

Cite This Work:

@inproceedings{ecological_memory_management,
               title={Ecological Memory Management},
               author={Derohanian, Erik and Field, Saul and Toliver, Dann},
               year=2022,
               month={April},
               pages={144--165},
               journal={Proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2022},
               publisher={Association for Computational Heresy},
               issn={2155-0166},
}