Flexible reference-counting-based hardware acceleration for garbage collection
José A. Joao, Onur Mutlu, Yale N. Patt · 2009
Languages featuring automatic memory management (garbage collection) are increasingly used to write all kinds of applications because they provide clear software engineering and security advantages. Unfortunately, garbage collection imposes a toll on performance and introduces pause times, making such languages less attractive for high-performance or real-time applications. Much progress has been made over the last five decades to reduce the overhead of garbage collection, but it remains significant.