“Generational garbage collector for your life. Young gen: the tote bag in your passenger seat, 47 tabs, 6 half-open dating apps. Mark and sweep runs at 3am while you sleep. Anything not reachable from a calendar event, a person you love, or a rent obligation gets free()’d by morning. Old gen tenures your wedding photos and one weird mug. Stop-the-world pause on your birthday. Enterprise: concurrent Shenandoah for your dad’s garage.”
The Problem
You have not deallocated anything since 2011. Your heap looks like a Brooklyn stoop after a stoop sale that no one came to. Somewhere in there is a HDMI cable for a TV you sold in Ohio.
heap.dump · your apartmentfragmentation 94%
leakedcablesstill usingunknownsentimental
allocated: 14 yrs · freed: 3 items · last compaction: never
The Solution
A three-generation collector that runs while you sleep. Objects start in Eden. If they survive one weekend without being touched, they get promoted to Survivor. Survive a full quarter, and you tenure into Old Gen — the region for things that actually matter, like your partner and the good spatula.
heap layout · post-compaction-73% mass · +81% peace
EdenIKEA bag, new hobby #4 Survivor S0gym shoes, one plant Survivor S1the good knife Old Genspouse, spatula, mom PermGenthe smell of grandma's kitchen next minor GC: tonight 03:14. next major GC: Sunday. next full: divorce.
Reachability Graph
An object is alive if a GC root can still reach it. GC roots for a human are: your calendar, your bank account, and the four people who would come to your funeral. Everything else is a candidate.
reachability · sample scanalive 4 · unreachable 5
Calendar root
Rent root
Mom root
Best Friend root
Sourdough starter (Ted)
alive
referenced by Sunday 10am
That coat
alive
referenced by winter
College Nalgene
unreachable
unreachable since 2018
8th grade Yahoo email
unreachable
no known refs
Ex’s hoodie
unreachable
cyclic ref w/ old feelings
Small screwdriver
alive
referenced weekly by IKEA
Timeshare in Cabo
unreachable
GC root refuses to admit it
Pause Times
Stop-the-world only happens at legally required moments: your birthday, December, and the fifteen minutes after any conversation containing the word “downsize.”
gc pause histogram · last 30 daysp50 3 min · p99 4.2 hrs
day 1day 22: mom visitedday 30
Failure Modes
MEMORY_LEAK
Ex’s Netflix account still holds a strong reference to your Continue Watching row. Nightly sweep never frees it. Recommend: System.gc() and a new profile.
PREMATURE_COLLECTION
GC evicted your one nice sweater as ‘dead code’ the week before a wedding. Compensation: emergency Uniqlo run at 8pm.
PROMOTION_STORM
You cried once about an air fryer. Tenured to Old Gen. Cannot be evicted without a therapist as GC root.
STOP_THE_WORLD
Full major GC triggered mid-Zoom by a Marie Kondo YouTube autoplay. Meeting frozen 4h. Camera on the whole time.
Pricing
SERIAL_GC
$0
One thread. Runs on Saturdays. Stops the world for the whole weekend. You come out of it disoriented but with a clean junk drawer.
G1GC
$18 / mo
Region-based, incremental. Never touches the couch. Guarantees soft real-time pauses under 45 minutes. Includes reminders to actually take the bag to Goodwill.
SHENANDOAH
$249 / mo
Fully concurrent. Compacts while you live your life. On-site collector wearing an apron. Nightly WAL of what got tossed, in case you regret it by Tuesday.
TAM
addressable market · humans with a “miscellaneous” drawer
1.9B adults × 237 unreachable objects each × $0.06 / reclaimed sq ft · yr
= $27B / yr in reclaimed shelf space
Methodology: our COO found a bread machine she has never used. Twice.
The Ask
$4M seed. 40% to a computer-vision model that can tell a candle from a candleholder from a candle that is also a gift from a candle that means something. 30% to a fleet of unmarked vans that arrive silently at 3am. 20% to legal (turns out throwing away someone else’s stuff without a write barrier is called “a felony”). 10% to a giant neon sign in the office that reads REACHABLE ≠ IMPORTANT. Series A pitch: “We’re Marie Kondo, but with a stop-the-world pause.”