gcj mingw32 and java memory footprint.

Wed Feb 19 04:11:00 GMT 2003

On 2003年2月19日, Norbert Frese wrote:
> just a theoretical reflection: would it be possible to combine a tracing
> collector with reference counting?

Sure that's possible. I don't know if it would be a win for gcj.
> but i guess there is no way to use such model with gcj, because it would
> require a lot of macros for reference copying... and i'm sure there are a
> lot of other problems involved with reference counting which i don't really
> know about... (threads, performance...)

Gcj itself could be modified to generate code for reference counting, so
it's not exactly impossible. However:
The size of every object would increase to store the ref count. That
might defeat the space savings you're after.
The atomic increment/decrement you'd need could impact performance
severely, I'd guess. Also the size of generated code would increase.
I think it would be an interesting experiment, difficulties
notwithstanding.
Jeff