This article provides a detailed description of the automatic theorem prover Simplify, which is the proof engine of the Extended Static Checkers ESC/Java and ESC/Modula-3. Simplify uses the Nelson--Oppen method to combine decision procedures for several important theories, and also employs a matcher to reason about quantifiers. Instead of conventional matching in a term DAG, Simplify matches up to equivalence in an E-graph, which detects many relevant pattern instances that would be missed by the conventional approach. The article describes two techniques, error context reporting and error localization, for helping the user to determine the reason that a false conjecture is false. The article includes detailed performance figures on conjectures derived from realistic program-checking problems.

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Assuming the existence of garbage collection makes it easier to design implementations of dynamic-sized concurrent data structures. However, this assumption limits their applicability. We present a methodology that, for a significant class of data structures, allows designers to first tackle the easier problem of designing a garbage-collection-dependent implementation, and then apply our methodology to achieve a garbage-collection-independent one. Our methodology is based on the well-known reference counting technique, and employs the double compare-and-swap operation.

Abstract. We discuss aspects of inlining of virtual method invocations. First, we introduce a new method test to guard inlinings of such invocations, with a different set of tradeoffs from the class-equality tests proposed previously in the literature. Second, we consider the problem of inlining virtual methods directly, with no guarding test, in dynamic languages such as Self or the Java TM programming language, whose semantics prohibit a static identification of the complete set of modules that comprise a program. In non-dynamic languages, a whole-program analysis might prove the correctness of a direct virtual inlining. In dynamic languages, however, such analyses can be invalidated by later class loading, and must therefore be treated as assumptions whose later violation must cause recompilation. In the past, such systems have required an on-stack replacement mechanism to update currently-executing invocations of methods containing invalidated inlinings. This paper presents analyses that allow some virtual calls to be inlined directly, while ensuring that invocations in progress may complete safely even if class loading invalidates the inlining for future invocations. This provides the benefits of direct inlining without the need for on-stack replacement, which can be complicated and require space-consuming data structures.

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This paper reports our experiences with a mostly-concurrent incremental garbage collector, implemented in the context of a high performance virtual machine for the Java TM programming language. The garbage collector is based on the "mostly parallel" collection algorithm of Boehm et al. and can be used as the old generation of a generational memory system. It overloads efficient write-barrier code already generated to support generational garbage collection to also identify objects that were modified during concurrent marking. These objects must be rescanned to ensure that the concurrent marking phase marks all live objects. This algorithm minimises maximum garbage collection pause times, while having only a small impact on the average garbage collection pause time and overall execution time. We support our claims with experimental results, for both a synthetic benchmark and real programs.

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