Conservative Garbage Collection for General Memory Allocators

Abstract

This paper explains a technique that integrates conservative garbage collection on top of general memory allocators. This is possible by using two data structures named malloc-tables and jump-tables that are computed at garbage collection time to map pointers to beginning of objects and their sizes. This paper describes malloc-tables and jump-tables, an implementation of a malloc/jump-table based conservative garbage collector for Doug Lea's memory allocator, and experimental results that compare this implementation with Boehm-Demers-Weiser GC, a state-of-the-art conservative garbage collector.