A very old and simple algorithm for garbage collection gives very good results when the physical memory is much larger than the number of reachable cells. In fact, the overhead associated with allocating and collecting cells from the heap can be reduced to less than one instruction per cell by increasing the size of physical memory. Special hardware, intricate garbage-collection algorithms, and fancy compiler analysis become unnecessary. Ordinarily, heap overflow in such a system is detect by a compare and conditional branch performed on each memory allocation. Andrew W. Appel.
Garbage collection can be faster than stack allocation.
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