Incorporating precise garbage collection in an Ada compiler

Abstract

In recent years an increasing effort to develop garbage collectors for real-time applications has been undertaken by the Java community. Currently it seems appropriate to evaluate the effort required to integrate such a facility into Ada.This paper presents an ongoing project to accomplish this goal by modifying the GNAT compiler to incorporate support for precise garbage collection. The approach taken can be immediately applied to current Ada 95 code, and allows coexistence of explicit and implicit deallocation. The text describes the extra code generated by a modified version of the front end and the corresponding run-time support for a mark-and-sweep collector.