A real-time garbage collector with low overhead and consistent utilization

Now that the use of garbage collection in languages like Java is becoming widely accepted due to the safety and software engineering benefits it provides, there is significant interest in applying garbage collection to hard real-time systems. Past approaches have generally suffered from one of two major flaws: either they were not provably real-time, or they imposed large space overheads to meet the real-time bounds. We present a mostly non-moving, dynamically defragmenting collector that overcomes both of these limitations: by avoiding copying in most cases, space requirements are kept low; and by fully incrementalizing the collector we are able to meet real-time bounds. We implemented our algorithm in the Jikes RVM and show that at real-time resolution we are able to obtain

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: POPL
• Authors: David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, V. T. Rajan
• Keywords: Garbage Collection, Hard Real-time Systems, POPL 2003, Programming Languages, Software Engineering Benefits