Around 1978 I wrote my first garbage collector, in PDP-10 assembly code, for the Clu language being developed by Barbara Liskov’s group at MIT. From the 1980s to the present I’ve been involved with garbage collection research as one of the main threads of my work. In these reflections I try to glean what patterns I can, with hope that younger generations of researchers may find something useful in them. While I formally retired in 2020, I continue to be active in research and will offer a few thoughts about the future as well as the past.

Bio:

Eliot Moss received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, culminating in a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, on the subject of nested transactions. He then served in the U.S. Army until 1985 when he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science (now the College of Information and Computer Sciences), University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he now holds the rank of Professor Emeritus, having retired in 2020. He co-directs the Architecture and Language Implementation Laboratory. Dr. Moss’s research focuses on efficient implementation of modern and emerging language features on modern and future hardware. He particularly well-known for his work on garbage collection, including being co-author of the Garbage Collection Handbook, on transactions and transactional memory, and on applications of machine learning to computer systems. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE, a co-recipient of the Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing in 2012, and of several “test of time” paper and software system awards. He is also an ordained Episcopal priest, a keeper of bees, and a husband and father of two adult children.