Going Where No GC Has Gone Before: A No-Tradeoff Memory System for Bosque

Abstract

Garbage Collectors (GCs) are a critical component of a modern application stack. Long pauses, large memory consumption, and high CPU usage can unexpectedly occur with certain workloads or series of events. These behaviors can make systems unresponsive, make it impossible to run them in resource-constrained environments, and are often very difficult to debug and fix – as their appearance may be intermittent. In fact recent theoretical work has shown what, for existing mainstream languages, these issues are unavoidable and, regardless of the GC design or implementation, there will always be workloads that cause them to occur!