This thesis presents work in the area of automatic memory management for hard real-time and embedded systems. The motivation of the thesis is to be able to develop hard real-time and embedded systems using modern languages. Since these languages commonly use automatic memory management or garbage collection (GC), which traditionally has had an unpredictable runtime behavior, we could either try to eliminate the need for GC using manual techniques, or we could develop GC techniques for these systems. Since GC is such a powerful tool to eliminate memory related programming errors, we decided to develop techniques to use GC in hard real-time and embedded systems. During this work three other GC techniques for these systems have been published. The main advantage of our work compared to the other three is that memory utilization efficiency increased by about 50 %. We have also developed an optimization
for incremental garbage collectors and a static garbage collector that aims to eliminate the need for runtime garbage collection.