LISP and Symbolic Computation, 10(2)159-181
Research Demonstration of a Hardware Reference-Counting HeapDavid S. Wise, Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-4101, USA
Brian Heck, Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-4101, USA
Caleb Hess, Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-4101, USA
Willie Hunt, Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-4101, USA
Eric Ost, Computer Science Department and Center for Innovative Computer Applications, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA
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Abstract: A hardware self-managing heap memory (RCM) for
languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, and Java has been designed, built,
tested and benchmarked. On every pointer write from the processor,
reference-counting transactions are performed in real time within this
memory, and garbage cells are reused without processor cycles. A
processor allocates new nodes simply by reading from a distinguished
location in its address space. The memory hardware also incorporates
support for off-line, multiprocessing, mark-sweep garbage
collection. Performance statistics are presented from a partial implementation of Scheme over five different memory models and two garbage collection strategies, from main memory (no access to RCM) to a fully operational RCM installed on an external bus. The performance of the RCM memory is more than competitive with main memory. Keywords: Performance, uniprocessor, garbage collection |
This article can be downloaded [here].
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