Abstract

Conservative garbage collectors are designed to operate in environments that do not provide sufficient information on the location of pointers. Instead of relying on compiler provided information on the location of pointers, they assume that any bit pattern that could be a valid pointer in fact is a valid pointer. This, however, can lead to inefficiencies and pointer misidentifications. In this position paper, we propose a simple runtime method that dynamically infers the pointer layout information during the garbage collection time. The inferred information might be used to make the subsequent passes of garbage collection run more efficiently.

Citations