System C Project - Write a Garbage Collector from Scratch

Linux/Windows System Programming - C Project, Heap Memory Leak detection tool, Operating System, Memory Management

What you'll learn

Developing a C/C++ Library
Integrating a Library with Application
How to implement Memory Leak Detector tool
How to track the Objects malloc'd by the application


Requirements

Good knowledge of C programming knowledge, and Pointers
Elementary knowledge of OS Memory Management

Description

I was asked this question in Amazon/Google Interviews :

1. How would you design a garbage collector for C programs?

2. If designing a garbage collector was that easy, why we don’t have it integrate with C programming language already ??

Complete this course to get the answers. :p


This course is a Project-based course and involved coding in C at every stage of the course.

Mention this project on your Resume with all proud.


This is a C Project (open for extension for C++) in which you will learn and write a library that catches the memory leaks, if any, by the application. In this project, I have explained step by step how to design and implement a garbage collector library called MLD (Memory Leak Detector) which when integrated to your application will provide the facility to catch leaked objects and report them. MLD library will be the generic library and has the ability to parse any application's data structures and manipulate them.

The Project is explained in 3 phases.


Note: This is a course that require a little bit of analysis power, beginner students can also learn much from this course that how you can create a program which can parse its own objects and structures. This technique is used to create many other projects out of which one is Memory leak detection.

Advice: Class of Students who needs "spoon-feeding", pls refrain from enrolling in project-based courses.


Key highlights :

Since the advent of C/C++ Programming language, Memory management is one of the responsibilities which the developer has to deal with

C/C++ Softwares often suffers from Two Memory related Problems :

Memory corruption

Memory leak

Unlike Java, C/C++ does not have the luxury for automatic garbage collection

Java does not allow programmer to access the physical memory directly, but C/C++ does, not does java expose pointers directly to the developer/coder. Therefore Java applications do not suffer from Memory corruption either, but C/C++ does

In this course, we will design and implement Memory Leak Detector (MLD) tool for C programs, easily extensible to C++ as well


Some Students have requested to provide a formal description of this project. For Students who want to mention this project in their resume, or doing this project as their OS project - you can mention the following title and abstract of this project as below :


Title: "Design and Implementation of Java-like Garbage Collector for C Programs".
In this project, we try to implement a garbage collector for C programs which work on the principle of reachability of objects to detect memory leaks. Through this project, we understand the limitation of such a garbage collector for C like programming languages (which have direct access to underlying memory addresses, unlike Java/python) and analyze its limitations and cost for being an inbuilt feature of C-like language.


Who this course is for:

College Grads, Programmers
Working Professional
System Programmers
Those looking for real world interesting C/C++ projects