Accurate garbage collection in uncooperative environments with lazy pointer stacks

Abstract

Implementing a new programming language by the means of a translator to an existing language is attractive as it provides portability over all platforms supported by the host language and reduces the 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 many platforms, and good portability. For garbage-collected languages, however, they are not a perfect match as they provide no support for accurately discovering pointers to heap-allocated data. We evaluate the 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++ compiler and GCC as a back-end, and found that our technique outperforms existing approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.