An orthogonally persistent system maintains data beyond any program execution. The principle of persistence identification implies that persistence by reachability be used to determine which objects are to be maintained in the store. A particular execution may cause objects to become unreachable—garbage. Any efficient implementation of a persistent system must incorporate a garbage collector to...

A number of possible approaches to automatic memory management in C++ have been considered over the years. Here we propose the reconsideration of an approach that relies on partially conservative garbage collection. Its principal advantage is that objects referenced by ordinary pointers may be garbage-collected. Unlike other approaches, this makes it possible to garbage-collect objects allocate...

The verification of memory safety–no program will crash when referencing memory–falls into two categories. A runtime system may enforce memory safety at a cost. Or, we may rely on error-prone programmers. Runtime overhead, most noticeably garbage collection, is undesirable in embedded or real-time systems. The frequency of collection points is not deterministic. Languages that rely on garbage c...

We present a new approach to parallel copying garbage collection on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines appropriate for Java and other object-oriented languages. Parallel, in this setting, means that the collector runs in several parallel threads. Our collector is based on a new idea called delayed allocation, which completely eliminates the fragmentation problem of previous parallel copyin...

Garbage collection has been around for a long time, and is accepted as a customary element for dynamic memory management in run-time systems of modern programming languages, for reasons of safety and for its clear software engineering benefits. The wide-spread acceptance of object-oriented languages makes it more important than ever to have garbage collection also work as fast as possible. The ...

It is generally thought that reasoning about programs in memory safe, garbage collected languages is much easier than in languages where the programmer has more explicit control over memory. Paradoxically, existing program logics are based on a low level view of storage that is sensitive to the presence or absence of unreachable cells, and Reynolds has pointed out that the Hoare triples derivab...

Current garbage collection (GC) techniques do not (and in general cannot) collect all the garbage that a program produces. This may lead to a performance slowdown and to programs running out of memory space. In this paper, we present a practical algorithm for statically detecting memory leaks occurring in arrays of objects in a garbage collected environment. No previous algorithm exists. The al...