GarCoSim: A Framework for Automated Memory Management Research and Evaluation

Abstract

Many modern programming languages rely on memory management environments that are responsible for allocation and deallocation of objects. Garbage collection phases are used in order to detect inaccessible objects on the heap so they can be deallocated. The performance of garbage collection techniques depends heavily on the environment, implementation specific parameters and the benchmark used. The contribution of this publication is an extendable memory management simulator, which aims to assist developers in memory management evaluation and research. The simulator is capable of reading operations from a trace file extracted from a virtual machine and simulating the memory management needed by the simulated mutator. The framework aims to provide an isolated experimentation and comparison platform in the field of automatic memory management. New algorithms can be added to the framework in order to compare them to established algorithms.