JUICE is a Java ME experimental Java virtual machine written in C according to the Sun Microsystems specifications. The Juice JVM, designed for real-time Java, was specifically developed to run on the NUXI operating system. The most relevant features of Juice are related to the structure for the heap memory, to the object allocation policy and to the garbage collector used.
In Juice, all the available heap memory is shared in "chunks" of pre-fixed size. The memory unit used is the "d-word" (that stands for "double-word"). The actual default size of the chunks is fixed to 64 d-words. The free memory chunks are organized in a linked list, while the chunks occupied by Java objects are connected to each other through a hierarchical structure in a way that resembles the representation of the UNIX file system.
The object allocation policy in Juice is strictly connected to the structure used to represent heap memory. Because of this structure, it becomes possible to allocate (and deallocate) Java objects in a time that is dependent only on the size of the object itself (predictability).
The proposed garbage collector is based on a non-copying tracing collector that performs memory reclamation only when a new object has to be allocated. The name of the garbage collector is because the cost paid by the mutator, in terms of wasted time for collector execution, is proportional to the size of the object to allocate.
Garbage Collector, Heap Memory Management: Corrado Santoro, Roberto Aloi
All the rest: Corrado Santoro
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory which was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced—also called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp.
A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes what is required in a JVM implementation. Having a specification ensures interoperability of Java programs across different implementations so that program authors using the Java Development Kit (JDK) need not worry about idiosyncrasies of the underlying hardware platform.
Java and C++ are two prominent object-oriented programming languages. By many language popularity metrics, the two languages have dominated object-oriented and high-performance software development for much of the 21st century, and are often directly compared and contrasted. Java appeared about 10 years later and its syntax was based on C/C++.
Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time.
In object-oriented programming (OOP), the object lifetime of an object is the time between an object's creation and its destruction. Rules for object lifetime vary significantly between languages, in some cases between implementations of a given language, and lifetime of a particular object may vary from one run of the program to another.
C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely malloc, realloc, calloc and free.
In computer programming, tracing garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management that consists of determining which objects should be deallocated by tracing which objects are reachable by a chain of references from certain "root" objects, and considering the rest as "garbage" and collecting them. Tracing garbage collection is the most common type of garbage collection – so much so that "garbage collection" often refers to tracing garbage collection, rather than other methods such as reference counting – and there are a large number of algorithms used in implementation.
Jupiter JVM is an open-source Java virtual machine, which has been developed as a master thesis with modularity and extensibility in mind. It uses Boehm garbage collector and GNU Classpath. The Jupiter Virtual Machine main aspects of its design can be simplified as:
In computer science, unreachable memory is a block of memory allocated dynamically where the program that allocated the memory no longer has any reachable pointer that refers to it. Similarly, an unreachable object is a dynamically allocated object that has no reachable reference to it. Informally, unreachable memory is dynamic memory that the program can not reach directly, nor get to by starting at an object it can reach directly, and then following a chain of pointer references.
In computer storage, fragmentation is a phenomenon in which storage space, main storage or secondary storage, is used inefficiently, reducing capacity or performance and often both. The exact consequences of fragmentation depend on the specific system of storage allocation in use and the particular form of fragmentation. In many cases, fragmentation leads to storage space being "wasted", and in that case the term also refers to the wasted space itself.
In computer science, garbage includes data, objects, or other regions of the memory of a computer system, which will not be used in any future computation by the system, or by a program running on it. Because every computer system has a finite amount of memory, and most software produces garbage, it is frequently necessary to deallocate memory that is occupied by garbage and return it to the heap, or memory pool, for reuse.
In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting. The main manually managed languages still in widespread use today are C and C++ – see C dynamic memory allocation.
In compiler optimization, escape analysis is a method for determining the dynamic scope of pointers – where in the program a pointer can be accessed. It is related to pointer analysis and shape analysis.
In software development, the programming language Java was historically considered slower than the fastest 3rd generation typed languages such as C and C++. The main reason being a different language design, where after compiling, Java programs run on a Java virtual machine (JVM) rather than directly on the computer's processor as native code, as do C and C++ programs. Performance was a matter of concern because much business software has been written in Java after the language quickly became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running.
Eclipse OpenJ9 is a high performance, scalable, Java virtual machine (JVM) implementation that is fully compliant with the Java Virtual Machine Specification.
In computer programming, a variable is an abstract storage location paired with an associated symbolic name, which contains some known or unknown quantity of information referred to as a value; or in simpler terms, a variable is a container for a particular set of bits or type of data. A variable can eventually be associated with or identified by a memory address. The variable name is the usual way to reference the stored value, in addition to referring to the variable itself, depending on the context. This separation of name and content allows the name to be used independently of the exact information it represents. The identifier in computer source code can be bound to a value during run time, and the value of the variable may thus change during the course of program execution.
In computer science, region-based memory management is a type of memory management in which each allocated object is assigned to a region. A region, also called a zone, arena, area, or memory context, is a collection of allocated objects that can be efficiently reallocated or deallocated all at once. Like stack allocation, regions facilitate allocation and deallocation of memory with low overhead; but they are more flexible, allowing objects to live longer than the stack frame in which they were allocated. In typical implementations, all objects in a region are allocated in a single contiguous range of memory addresses, similarly to how stack frames are typically allocated.
The Garbage-First Collector (G1) is a garbage collection algorithm introduced in the Oracle HotSpot Java virtual machine (JVM) 6 and supported from 7 Update 4. It was planned to replace Concurrent mark sweep collector (CMS) in JVM 7 and was made default in Java 9.
Language interoperability is the capability of two different programming languages to natively interact as part of the same system and operate on the same kind of data structures.