Eliminating object reference checks by escape analysis on real-time Java virtual machine

Abstract

The real-time specification for Java (RTSJ) makes Java to be a real-time programming language. However, the RTSJ’s memory management system is more complicated than J2SE’s. The assignment rules of RTSJ, which prevent the creation of dangling references, must be checked by real-time Java virtual machines (JVMs) at run-time. These frequent run-time object reference checks introduce significant time overheads and unpredictable execution time, which has great impact on real-time systems. This paper presents an equivalence class based, context sensitive and flow insensitive escape analysis algorithm that effectively eliminates unnecessary run-time reference checkpoints of RTSJ programs. The optimization framework has been implemented in an open-source real-time JVM namely jRate and evaluated by CD$$_x$$, a relative authority real-time Java benchmark suite. The results show that this optimization algorithm eliminates more than 90% static reference checkpoints, removes about 50% run-time reference checkpoints on average , and improves the run-time performance of average 3.13%, max 8.93%.