Many high-level language compilers generate C code and then invoke a C compiler for code generation. To date, most of these compilers link the resulting code against a conservative mark-sweep garbage collector in order to reclaim unused memory. We introduce a new collector, MCC, based on an extension of mostly-copying collection. We analyze the various design decisions made in MCC and provide a performance comparison to the most widely used conservative mark-sweep collector (the Boehm-DemersWeiser collector). Our results show that a good mostlycopying collector can outperform a mature highly-optimized mark-sweep collector when physical memory is large relative to the live data. A surprising result of our analysis is that cache behavior can have a greater impact on overall performance than either collector time, or allocation code. 1 Overview For almost any language, there are a handful of compilers that generate C [1] as a target language. For instance, Javato -C compilers include T...

Memory management is a critical issue for many large object-oriented applications, but in C++ only explicit memory reclamation through the delete operator is generally available. We analyse different possibilities for memory management in C++ and present a dynamic memory management framework which can be customised to the need of specific applications. The framework allows full integration and coexistence of different memory management techniques. The Customisable Memory Management (CMM) is based on a primary collector which exploits an evolution of Bartlett's mostly copying garbage collector. Specialised collectors can be built for separate memory heaps. A Heap class encapsulates the allocation strategy for each heap. We show how to emulate different garbage collection styles or user-specific memory management techniques. The CMM is implemented in C++ without any special support in the language or the compiler. The techniques used in the CMM are general enough to be applicable also to...

. Many high-level language compilers generate C code and then invoke a C compiler to do code generation, register allocation, stack management, and low-level optimization. To date, most of these compilers link the resulting code against a conservative mark-sweep garbage collector in order to reclaim unused memory. We introduce a new collector, MCC, based on mostly-copying collection, and characterize the conditions that favor such a collector over a mark-sweep collector. In particular we demonstrate that mostly-copying collection outperforms conservative mark-sweep under the same conditions that accurate copying collection outperforms accurate mark-sweep: Specifically, MCC meets or exceeds the performance of a mature mark-sweep collector when allocation rates are high, and physical memory is large relative to the live data. 1 High Level Overview Languages such as C [1] and C++ [27] are GC-unfriendly because they allow programs to violate the key premise of tracing garbage collection--...