An on-the-fly reference counting garbage collector for Java

  • Authors:
  • Yossi Levanoni;Erez Petrank

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, ;Dept. of Computer Science, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '01 Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Reference counting is not naturally suitable for running on multiprocessors. The update of pointers and reference counts requires atomic and synchronized operations. We present a novel reference counting algorithm suitable for a multiprocessor that does not require any synchronized operation in its write barrier (not even a compare-and-swap type of synchronization). The algorithm is efficient and may complete with any tracing algorithm.