In accordance with the present invention a method is provided for managing objects during a garbage collection operation. The process comprises the steps of compacting objects in a memory, allocating an available memory location for a surviving object and a corresponding hash field, storing the surviving object in the available memory location by copying the surviving object from a previous memory location to the available memory location, and storing a hash value for the surviving object in the hash field. The hash value includes a memory address for the previous memory location. In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, a method is provided for managing objects stored in memory. The method comprises the steps of receiving an instruction to allocate an object, locating space in a memory for the object, storing the object at the located space, and including in the stored object a header portion reflecting a hash status. The hash status is used to indicate (i) whether the object has been hashed and (ii) whether the object has a hash field.