International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO'05)
Compile-Time Concurrent Marking Write Barrier Removal
San Jose, California
March 20-March 23
ISBN: 0-7695-2298-X
Garbage collectors incorporating concurrent marking to cope with large live data sets and stringent pause time constraints have become common in recent years. The snapshot-at-the-beginning style of concurrent marking has several advantages over the incremental update alternative, but one main disadvantage: it requires the mutator to execute a significantly more expensive write barrier. This paper demonstrates that a large fraction of these write barriers are unnecessary, and may be eliminated by static analysis.