Heap architectures for concurrent languages using message passing

We discuss alternative heap architectures for languages that rely on automatic memory management and implement con-currency through asynchronous message passing. We de-scribe how interprocess communication and garbage collec-tion happens in each architecture, and extensively discuss the tradeos that are involved. In an implementation set-ting (the Erlang/OTP system) where the rest of the runtime system is unchanged, we present a detailed experimental comparison between these architectures using both synthetic programs and large commercial products as benchmarks. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Construct