Local Variable Allocation For Accurate Garbage Collection of C++

Accurate garbage collection of C++ requires that every memory location and every register be known to contain either a pointer or a non-pointer. In order to minimize the run-time overhead of tagging memory locations and registers, techniques for partitioning memory and registers into separate classes dedicated independently to the representation of pointers and non-pointers respectively have been developed. This paper describes the implementation and performance of a specially designed activation frame targeted to the SPARC architecture, as implemented in a customized version of the GNU g++ compiler