#4 Chris Saunders on Teaching Garbage Collectors

Chris Saunders (http://twitter.com/chris_saunders) will be presenting the paper Teaching Garbage Collection without Implementing Compilers and Interpreters (http://jeapostrophe.github.io/home/static/cooper-sigcse2013.pdf) by G. Coopher, A. Guha, S. Krishnamurthi, J. McCarthy and R. Findler.

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The paper covers the issues with teaching Garbage Collection in an academic setting and the pitfalls around existing solutions. In an effort to remove obstacles that prevented students from implementing they have built a system that aids in the implementation of Garbage Collectors.

Along with presenting the paper, Chris will explain garbage collection, collector techniques as well as the collector and mutator "languages" built by the authors. The system is publicly available (http://docs.racket-lang.org/plai/collector.html) and you can see a number of collector implementations (https://github.com/plt/racket/blob/84de4fd8e3a60254a7653fa90c80e9c4ec2bdca8/pkgs/plai/tests/gc/good-collectors/good-collector.rkt) that you can use to experiment within Dr. Racket.

Doors open at 6:30 pm, presentation will begin at 7:00 pm. There will be food and refreshments provided by Shopify.

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Chris Saunders (http://twitter.com/chris_saunders) is a software developer at Shopify (http://shopify.com/). Normally he is helping the Merchant Marketing team, but is currently taking a sabbatical to expand his computational horizons (http://learningtolearn.sndrs.ca/). In his spare time he enjoys brewing his own beer, throwing hatchets and playing boardgames.