Pointer killing is a way of assisting a garbage collector by explicitly nulling out pointers which are no longer live. The garbage collector is assisted, as one less pointer to (possible) semantic garbage is maintained in the root set (see TaglessGarbageCollection for why).
PointerKilling can either be:
- Explicit -- the programmer sets a pointer to NULL after he's done with it, or
- Implicit -- the compiler inserts code to null the pointer after its last use as an rvalue.
Are there any languages or language implementations out there that do implicit pointer killing?
CategoryGarbageCollection CategoryPointer