Oil and Water? High Performance Garbage Collection in Java with JMTk

Increasingly popular languages such as Java and C# require efficient and flexible garbage collection. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of JMTk, a Java Memory Management Toolkit in Java. We show a software engineering success story with an efficient, composable, extensible, and portable framework for quickly building and evaluating collectors. JMTk attains its modularity and efficiency using a few design patterns and compiler cooperation. Experimental comparisons with monolithic Java and C implementations reveal significant performance advantages from our design. Performance critical system software typically uses monolithic C at the expense of flexibility. Our results refute common wisdom that only this approach attains efficiency, and suggest that performance critical software can embrace modular design.