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Self paper: "Write Barrier"

A Fast Write Barrier for Generational Garbage Collectors

Urs Hölzle
Abstract: Generational garbage collectors need to keep track of references from older to younger generations so that younger generations can be garbage-collected without inspecting every object in the older generation(s). The set of locations potentially containing pointers to newer objects is often called the remembered set. At every store, the system must ensure that the updated location is added to the remembered set if the store creates a reference from an older to a newer object. This mechanism is usually referred to as a write barrier or store check.

For some stores, the compiler can know statically that no store check is necessary, for example, when storing an integer (assuming that integers are implemented as immediates rather than as real heap-allocated objects). However, in the general case, a store check must be executed for every store operation. Since stores are fairly frequent in non-functional languages, an efficient write barrier implementation is essential. The write barrier implementation described here reduces the write barrier overhead in the mutator to only two extra instructions per checked store.

OOPSLA'93 Workshop on Garbage Collection, Washington, D.C., October 1993

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