Hard Real-Time Reference Counting without External Fragmentation?

Using automatic memory management eliminates many programming errors that are both hard to find and to correct. Automatic memory management has been used frequently in functional and object oriented languages. These languages have rarely been used in hard real-time systems in the past. However, JavaTM has made the hard realtime community interested because of it robustness and platform independence. Introducing JavaTM in the hard real-time domain causes many problems. One of them is how to adapt the automatic memory manager to be fully predictable in both execution time and memory usage. This paper proposes such a technique.