Abstract Concurrent Garbage Collection Using Program Slices on

Abstract

We investigate reference counting in the context of a multithreaded architecture by exploiting two observations: (1) reference-counting can be performed by a transformed program slice of the mutator that isolates heap references, and (2) hardware trends indicate that microprocessors in the near future will be able to execute multiple concurrent threads on a single chip. We generate a reference-counting collector as a transformed program slice of an application and then execute this slice in parallel with the application as a “run-behind ” thread. Preliminary measurements of collector overheads are quite encouraging, showing a 25 % to 53 % space overhead to transfer garbage collection to a separate thread.