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Short-term Memory for Self-collecting mutators
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by Martin Aigner, Andreas Haas, Christoph Kirsch, Hannes Payer, Andreas Schoenegger, and Ana Sokolova 
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Abstract:
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We propose a new memory model, short-term memory, and an algorithm that employs it, called self-collecting mutators. In short-term memory objects expire after a certain amount of time, which makes deallocation unnecessary. Self-collecting mutators require programmer support to control the time and thereby enable reusing the memory of expired objects. We identify a class of programs for which programmer support is easy and correctness is guaranteed. We also provide support for multi-threaded applications. Self-collecting mutators perform competitively with garbage-collected systems, as shown by our experimental results on several benchmarks. Unlike garbage-collected systems, our system has no pause times, provides constant execution time of all memory operations, independent of number of live objects, and constant memory consumption after a steady state has been reached.
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