Towards an understanding of the behavior of the single parent rule in the RTSJ scoped memory model

Abstract

The memory model used in the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ) imposes strict assignment rules to or from memory areas preventing the creation of dangling pointers, and thus maintaining the pointer safety of Java. An implementation solution to ensure the checking of these rules before each assignment statement consists of performing it dynamically by using write barriers. This solution adversely affects both the performance and predictability of the RTSJ application. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm for managing scoped regions which requires some modifications in the current RTSJ specification.