Incremental garbage collection of concurrent objects for real-time applications

The authors show how to perform real-time automatic garbage collection of objects possessing their own thread of control. Beyond its interest as a novel real-time problem, the relevance of automatic management and concurrent objects to real-time applications is briefly discussed. The specific model of concurrent objects used in the paper is explained. A definition of real-time garbage collection is given and an algorithm satisfying this definition is described. An analysis of the relationship between latency, memory overhead and system size shows that this approach is immediately feasible for low-performance real-time systems or multiprocessor real-time systems with a dedicated processor for garbage collection. Future improvements in the collector´s performance are outlined