WAND: CONCURRENT BOXING SYSTEM FOR ALL POINTERS WITH OR WITHOUT GARBAGE COLLECTION

摘要

Boxed pointers are disclosed, for all pointers, for safe and sequential or parallel use. Since a pointer box can be arbitrarily large, it supports any fat pointer encoding possible. The boxed pointers are managed out of the same heap or stack space as ordinary objects, providing scalability by a shared use of the entire program memory. The boxed pointers and objects are managed together by the same parallel, safe, memory management system including an optional precise, parallel garbage collector. To manage boxes independently of the garbage collector, explicit allocation and de-allocation means are provided including explicit killing of boxes using immediate or deferred frees. The entire system is constructed out of atomic registers as the sole shared memory primitive, avoiding all synchronization primitives and related expenses. Atomic pointer operations including pointer creation or deletion (malloc or free) are provided.