Reference type

Abstract: : Most specifications of garbage collectors concentrate on the low-level algorithmic details of how to find and preserve accessible objects. Often, they focus on bit-level manipulations such as 'scanning stack frames,' 'marking objects,' 'tagging data,' etc. While these details are important in some contexts, they often obscure the more fundamental aspects of memory management: what objects are garbage and why? We develop a series of calculi that are just low-level enough that we can express allocation and garbage collection, yet are sufficiently abstract that we may formally prove the correctness of various memory management strategies. By making the heap of a program syntactically apparent, we can specify memory actions as rewriting rules that allocate values on the heap and automatically dereference pointers to such objects when needed. This formulation permits the specification of garbage collection as a relation that removes portions of the heap without affecting the outcome of the evaluation.

Abstract: The choice of binding time disciplines has major consequences for both the run-time efficiency of programs and the convenience of the language expressing algorithms. Late storage binding time, dynamic allocation, provides the flexibility necessary to implement the complex data structures common in today's object oriented style of programming. In this paper we show that compile-time lifetime analysis can be applied to programs written in languages with static type systems and dynamically allocated objects, to provide earlier storage binding time for objects, while maintaining all the advantages of dynamic allocation.

Abstract: The present invention is a method and system of automatic memory management (garbage collection). An application automatically marks up objects referenced from the “extended root set”. At garbage collection, the system starts traversal from the marked-up objects. It can conduct accurate garbage collection in a non-GC language, such as C++. It provides a deterministic reclamation feature. An object and its resources are released immediately when the last reference is dropped. Application codes automatically become entirely GC-safe and interruptible. A concurrent collector can be pause-less and with predictable worst-case latency of micro-second level. Memory usage is efficient and the cost of reference counting is significantly reduced.

Abstract: Information is computed about the reachability relationships among objects and pointers to enable transformation of a computer program for optimizing the creation and destruction of objects, while strictly performing the semantics of the original program. An interprocedural analysis is used to determine whether an object that is allocated on the heap during the execution of a procedure is not reachable from any global variable, parameter, or the return value of the procedure after it returns. If so, that object can be allocated on the stack frame of the procedure in which it is otherwise heap-allocated. This simplifies the memory allocation and deallocation operations, as allocation on the stack can be done more efficiently than allocation on the heap, and objects allocated on the stack frame of a procedure are automatically deallocated when the procedure returns, without incurring the overhead of garbage collection. This, in turn, leads to faster programs which use fewer computer processor resources to execute. The interprocedural analysis of the program summarizes the effect of a procedure call succinctly for different calling contexts of the procedure using a single summary representation. The method handles exceptions in the programming language, while taking advantage of the information about the visibility of variables in the exception handler. Variants of the method show how one or several of the features of the method may be performed.