Accurate garbage collection in uncooperative environments revisited

Implementing a concurrent programming language such as Java by means of a translator to an existing language is attractive as it provides portability over all platforms supported by the host language and reduces development time - as many low-level tasks can be delegated to the host compiler. The C and C++ programming languages are popular choices for many language implementations due to the availability of efficient compilers on a wide range of platforms. For garbage-collected languages, however, they are not a perfect match as no support is provided for accurately discovering pointers to heap-allocated data on thread stacks. We evaluate several previously published techniques and propose a new mechanism, lazy pointer stacks, for performing accurate garbage collection in such uncooperative environments. We implemented the new technique in the Ovm Java virtual machine with our own Java-to-C/C++ compiler using GCC as a back-end compiler. Our extensive experimental results confirm that lazy pointer stacks outperform existing approaches: we provide a speedup of 4.5 over Henderson's accurate collector with a 17 increase in code size. Accurate collection is essential in the context of real-time systems, we thus validate our approach with the implementation of a real-time concurrent garbage collection algorithm.