A fully concurrent garbage collector

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the number of memory-managed programming languages has proliferated. Such languages use uniprocessormemorymanagement techniques to allocate and reclaim storage on behalf of programs. Multicores and other forms of multiprocessor systems have evolved to become common place. However, deployed memory management techniques largely have not taken advantage of the benefits ofmultiprocessor systems.We present a fully concurrent garbage collector that offers negligible synchronization cost and leverages the power, speed, and potential of multicores and other multiprocessor systems. This collector makes its best effort to avoid suspending application threads as many concurrent (and other on-the-fly) collectors do. Instead, it retrieves requisite data opportunistically from each thread to compute its view of the heap and perform garbage collection work. Our collector is an efficient, high performance garbage collector that yields features that are desirable for multiprocessor real-time systems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.