Conservative garbage collectors are designed to operate in environments that do not provide su cient information on the location of pointers. Instead of relying on compiler provided information on the location of pointers, they assume that any bit pattern that could be a valid pointer in fact is a valid pointer. This, however, can lead to ine ciencies and pointer misidenti cations. In this posi...

Our research is concerned with compiler-independent, tag-free garbage collection for the C ++ programming language. This paper presents a mark-and-sweep collector , and explains how it ameliorates shortcomings of a previous copy collector. The new collector, like the old, uses C ++ 's facilities for creating abstract data types to deene a tracked reference type, called roots, at the level of th...

The design of garbage collectors combines both theoretical aspects (safety and liveness) and practical ones (such as efficiency, inobtrusiveness, ease of implementation, fault tolerance, etc.). Although distributed GC is an instance of a consistency problem, practical designs often use weaker, “conservative” safety conditions, and/or weaker, “incomplete” liveness conditions. We report on our ex...

The ongoing shift from 32-bit to 64-bit processor environments forces garbage collectors to cope with the larger heaps made possible by the increased address space. On 32-bit machines, generational collectors that occasionally pause to collect the entire heap work well enough for many applications, but that paradigm does not scale up because collection pauses that take time proportional to the ...

Automatic memory management techniques eliminate many programming errors that are both hard to find and to correct. However, these techniques are not yet used in embedded systems with hard realtime applications. The reason is that current methods for automatic memory management have a number of drawbacks. The two major ones are: (1) not being able to always guarantee short real-time deadlines a...

Traditional memory allocation mechanisms are not suitable for new DRAM-based storage systems because they use memory inefficiently, particularly under changing access patterns. In theory, copying garbage collectors can deal with workload changes by defragmenting memory, but in practice the general-purpose collectors used in programming languages perform poorly at high memory utilisations. The r...

This paper describes the design and the evaluation of Complementary Garbage Collector that is a fundamental algorithm for the parallel and incremental garbage collector. Our algorithm is a combination of two types of fundamental algorithms, incremental update and snapshot-at-beginning, which are complementary to each other. The algorithm has the advantages of both types: great e ciency of the g...

Many of the current software systems rely on garbage collectors for automatic memory management. This is also the case for various software systems in real-time applications. However, a real-time application often requires an incremental working style of the underlying garbage collection, which renders the garbage collector more complex and less trustworthy. We present a formal verification of ...

Generational garbage collection is an established method for creating eecient garbage collectors. Even a simple implementation where all nodes that survive one garbage collection are tenured, i.e., moved to an old generation, works well in strict languages. In a lazy language, however, such an implementation can create severe temporary space leaks. The temporary space leaks appear in programs t...