Lambda the Ultimate

(this researcher seems to me (an ignorant neophyte admittedly), to have quite a bit of interesting work on GC, among other interesting things.)

Generational Real-Time Garbage Collection

Abstract. While real-time garbage collection is now available in pro- duction virtual machines, the lack of generational capability means ap- plications with high allocation rates are subject to reduced throughput and high space overheads.

Since frequent allocation is often correlated with a high-level, object- oriented style of programming, this can force builders of real-time sys- tems to compromise on software engineering.

We have developed a fully incremental, real-time generational col- lector based on a tri-partite nursery, which partitions the nursery into regions that are being allocated, collected, and promoted. Nursery col- lections are incremental, and can occur within any phase of a mature collection.

We present the design, mathematical model, and implementation of our collector in IBM’s production Real-time Java virtual machine, and show both analytically and experimentally that the collector achieves real-time bounds comparable to a non-generational Metronome-style col- lector, while cutting memory consumption and total execution times by as much as 44% and 24% respectively.

p.s. i'm less interested in supporting OO everywhere than i am in having kick-ass GCs, i assume that using something more FP with a GC like this would be never less performant anyway.