Mixed-mode bytecode execution

Modern high-performance virtual machines use dynamic compilation. There is a tension between compilation speed and code quality. We argue that a highly-optimizing compiler is best deployed with both a fast, less-optimizing compiler and an interpreter. We present measurements showing that such a system can achieve the same peak performance as a system with just the optimizing compiler, and startup costs similar to a system with just the interpreter and fast compiler. M/S MTV29-0

Concurrent garbage collection for C++

Abstract: "Automatic storage management, or garbage collection, is a feature usually associated with languages oriented toward 'symbolic processing,' such as Lisp or Prolog; it is seldom associated with 'systems' languages, such as C and C++. This report surveys techniques for performing garbage collection for languages such as C and C++, and presents an implementation of a concurrent copying collector for C++. The report includes performance measurements on both a uniprocessor and a multiprocessor.

Concurrent garbage collection for C++

Automatic storage management, or garbage collection, is a feature usually associated with languages oriented toward ‘‘symbolic processing,’’ such as Lisp or Prolog; it is seldom associated with ‘‘systems’’ languages, such as C and C++. This report surveys techniques for performing garbage collection for languages such as C and C++, and presents an implementation of a concurrent copying collector for C++. The report includes performance measurements on both a uniprocessor and a multiprocessor

Memory Allocation Costs in Large C and C++ Programs

Dynamic storage allocation is an important part of a large class of computer programs written in C and C++. High-performance algorithms for dynamic storage allocation have been, and will continue to be, of considerable interest. This paper presents detailed measurements of the cost of dynamic storage allocation in 11 diverse C and C++ programs using ve very di erent dynamic storage allocation implementations, including a conservative garbage collection algorithm. Four of the allocator implementations measured are publicly-available on the Internet. A number of the programs used in these measurements are also available on the Internet to facilitate further research in dynamic storage allocation. Finally, the data presented in this paper is an abbreviated version of more extensive statistics that are also publically-available on the Internet.

Eliminating synchronization-related atomic operations with biased locking and bulk rebiasing

The Java TM programming language contains built-in synchronization primitives for use in constructing multithreaded programs. Efficient implementation of these synchronization primitives is necessary in order to achieve high performance. Recent research [9, 12, 10, 3, 7] has focused on the run-time elimination of the atomic operations required to implement object monitor synchronization primitives. This paper describes a novel technique called store-free biased locking which eliminates all synchronization-related atomic operations on uncontended object monitors. The technique supports the bulk transfer of object ownership from one thread to another, and the selective disabling of the optimization where unprofitable, using epoch-based bulk rebiasing and revocation. It has been implemented in the production version of the Java HotSpot TM VM and has yielded significant performance improvements on a range of benchmarks and applications. The technique is applicable to any virtual machine-based programming language implementation with mostly block-structured locking primitives