The Design of a Novel Object-oriented Processor : OOMIPS

A novel object-oriented processor is proposed in this paper, which provides support for object addressing, message passing and dynamic memory management. Object running on this processor has its own control thread and communicates with others via messages. A virtual addressed object cache that reduces the indirection overhead while maintaining the efficiency of object relocation is presented. Object table that maintains the handles is used to obtain the actual object location on an object cache miss. Hardware support for explicit dynamic memory management is provided. Object allocation and deletion is strictly bounded in time. Moreover, a new concurrently dynamic memory management algorithm is proposed, which enables the processor to freely access heap during memory compaction and the applications will not be suspended for the completion of memory compaction.