Are many heaps better than one?

The recent introduction by Intel of widely available Non-Volatile RAM has reawakened interest in persistence, a hot topic of the 1980s and 90s. The most ambitious schemes of that era were not adopted; I will speculate as to why, and introduce a new approach based on multiple heaps, designed to overcome the problems. I’ll present the main features of the new persistence model, and describe a prototype implementation I’ve been working on for GraalVM Native Image. This purpose of this work-in-progress is to allow experimentation with the new model, so that the community can assess its desirability. I’ll outline the main features of the prototype and some of the remaining challenges.