A marriage of pointer- and epoch-based reclamation

All pointer-based nonblocking concurrent data structures should deal with the problem of safe memory reclamation: before reclaiming a memory block, a thread should ensure no other threads hold a local pointer to the block that may later be dereferenced. Various safe memory reclamation schemes have been proposed in the literature, but none of them satisfy the following desired properties at the same time: (i) robust: a non-cooperative thread does not prevent the other threads from reclaiming an unbounded number of blocks; (ii) fast: it does not incur significant time overhead; (iii) compact: it does not incur significant space overhead; (iv) self-contained: it neither relies on special hardware/OS supports nor intrusively affects execution environments; and (v) widely applicable: it supports many data structures.