Cheney, is a stop and copy method of tracing garbage collection in computer software systems.
Garbage collection is performed by copying live objects from one semispace (the from-space) to the other (the to-space), which then becomes the new heap.
[citation needed] Cheney's algorithm reclaims items as follows: Once all to-space references have been examined and updated, garbage collection is complete.
The data between the two pointers represents work remaining for it to do (those objects are gray in the tri-color terminology, see later).
Cheney based his work on the semispace garbage collector, which was published a year earlier by R.R.