From 8-Second Pauses to Sub-Millisecond: The 60-Year Evolution of Garbage Collection
In 1959, John McCarthy was building Lisp at MIT when he encountered a problem that would define decades of programming language design. Programs in Lisp created and destroyed linked structures constantly—lists within lists, functions returning functions, recursive structures that no programmer could feasibly track manually. McCarthy’s solution was to make memory management automatic. He called it “garbage collection,” dedicating just over a page in his seminal paper to describe a mark-and-sweep algorithm that would free programmers from the burden of explicit deallocation. ...