Garbage Collection for Mostly Serialized Heaps

Abstract

Over the years, traditional tracing garbage collectors have accumulated assumptions that may not hold in new language designs. For instance, we usually assume that run-time objects do not hold addressable sub-parts and have a size of at least one pointer. These fail in systems striving to eliminate pointers and represent data in a dense, serialized form, such as the Gibbon compiler. We propose a new memory management strategy for language runtimes with mostly serialized heaps. It uses a hybrid, generational collector, where regions are bump-allocated into the young generation and objects are bump-allocated within those regions. Minor collections copy data into larger regions in the old generation, compacting it further. The old generation uses region-level reference counting. The resulting system maintains high performance for data traversal programs, while significantly improving performance on other kinds of allocation patterns.