Better Understanding the Costs and Benefits of Automatic Memory Management
Kunal Sareen, Stephen Michael Blackburn · 2022
Automatic memory management relieves programmers of the burden of having to reason about object lifetimes in order to soundly reclaim allocated memory. However, this automation comes at a cost. The cost and benefits of garbage collection relative to manual memory management have been the subject of contention for a long time, and will likely remain so. However, until now, the question is surprisingly under-studied. We examine the costs and benefits of garbage collection through four studies, exploring: We conduct this study in a contemporary setting using recent CPU microarchitectures, and novel methodologies including a mark-sweep collector built upon off-the-shelf free-list allocators, allowing us to shed new light on garbage collection overheads in a modern context.