In Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2004), Toronto, Canada, 28 May 2004.
We introduce an aspect-oriented reformulation of reference-counting that is particularly well-suited to Java applications and does not share the error-prone characteristic of manual, user-driven reference counting. We present our method in the context of the Real-Time Specification for Java and demonstrate that it can recycle dead objects in bounded time. We apply partial evaluation to specialize the aspect-generated code, which substantially reduces the reference-counting overhead.
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