Mike has provided a copy of his slides, ODP or PPT.

There is a simple way to divide programming languages - those which support automatic memory management and those which don't. OK, there are a few languages, like Ada, that somehow manage to straddle the fence, but by and large a language is either in one camp or the other.

For decades automatic memory management, more popularly known as garbage collection, has been a staple of languages which use memory in complex ways (like Lisp and Java) and simultaneously looked upon as unachievable or impractical or temporally unsuitable by users of other languages (like Cobol, C, C++, and Fortran).

Our speaker this month, Mike Elliott, is a long time practitioner of object-oriented programming, having started with C++ but quickly moved on to Modula-3, Eiffel, Python and especially Java. He has been involved with real-time Java for the last few years, investigating the Aicas, Aonix, IBM, and Sun Microsystems real-time Java products. His presentation will illustrate the classical algorithms of garbage collection, discuss their ramifications and explore their use in real-time systems.

Additionally, Mike is a member of and active participant in subgroup 5, Object-oriented Technology, of SC-205/WG-71 of the RTCA/EUROCAE, which is currently revising DO-178B/ED-12B, Software Considerations for Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification. This subgroup is responsible for providing guidance and guidelines by which software developers can create airborne systems using object-oriented techniques; techniques which may well involve real-time garbage collection issues.

Involved in both management and engineering, Mike has held positions in industry ranging from embedded systems programmer to principal engineer to manager of operations software. Additionally he has taught extensively at the college and university level and has been a speaker at several conferences and symposia, including TOOLS Europe, The JDJ Edge Conference, the Embedded Systems Conference, and the Boeing Technical Excellence Conference.