Garbage collection

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Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott: The explanations of many things I'd read in other sources are no less than fantastic, I now understand a bunch of things I had only superficially "got" previously. http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-... , check out the overview and reviews. Coders at Work by Peter Seibel: By far the best of this type of book (well, not counting the '80s classic Programmers at Work which I haven't read since then), one of the best Lisp authors interviews in depth a lot of really interesting and/or important people, from James Zawinski to Donald Knuth, with Javascript, static FP and PARC people, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen ( really important interview which points out how C/C++ to the exclusion of truly high level languages have been a disaster when used bey…

… is usually added to reference counting so that if there's garbage which contains references to itself but has no external references, it will eventually be collected. (_Garbage Collection_ by Richard Jones and Rafael Lins is an excellent resource on GC details, btw. There's also a decent overview in the O'Reilly OCaml book ( http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/book-ora082.... )). In other words, it plugs the worst memory leaks caused by reference counting. How to do multiprocessor / multithread GC well is still an area of active research. In the mean time, one simpler solution is to have several independent VM states, each running in their own thread (or process), and communicating via message passing. Lua makes this easy, but its VM is considerably lighter than Python's.