Ruby Garbage Collection, A People's History

C Ruby’s garbage collector has come a long way since the good old days of Ruby 1.8. In this talk, Nate Berkopec (who maintains Sentry’s Ruby SDK) walks through over 20 years of GC history in the C Ruby runtime, and along the way discusses the key features that were added with each Ruby version.

This talk is a general introduction and discussion of concepts in garbage collection in high-level languages. In addition to the above, Nate covers:

• The 5 (!) different GC algorithms C Ruby has used since 1.8
• Copy-on-write optimization
• Possible Optimizations for the future

This talk is intended for developers who have never really thought about these topics before, but have a few years of Ruby experience under their belt. Includes ten minutes of Q&A at the end.