Tony Hosking

Tony combines practical memory-management research with writing and openly available testing work. The Julia collaboration provides an implemented foundation for alternative garbage collectors and guidance for language developers, while The Garbage Collection Handbook shares specialist knowledge. For testing researchers and engineers assessing fuzzing techniques, datAFLow supplies inspectable code and evidence of both additional bug discoveries and performance limits.

Tony Hosking is Professor of Computer Science at Australian National University, researching the runtime machinery that manages application memory. Holding a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, along with degrees from the universities of Waikato and Adelaide, Tony co-authored The Garbage Collection Handbook, published in editions in 2012 and 2023.

In a co-authored 2025 practitioner report, Tony documented collaborative work enabling Julia to support different garbage collectors. The project implemented an interface and demonstrated integration with MMTk, a reusable memory-management framework, giving language developers practical guidance on modifying memory management within an established system.

Tony also co-authored the 2023 datAFLow study on fuzz testing, investigating guidance based on how data moves between operations. Published code and an accompanying replication report make the approach open to inspection, documenting bugs missed by other tools alongside substantial running costs to inform decisions about performance and testing.