Patents by Inventor William D. Clinger

William D. Clinger has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 6999980
    Abstract: In a computer system that uses a generational garbage collector in which objects are promoted from a “young” generation to an “old” generation, a compiler output designates certain dynamic-allocation instructions as being ones whose resultant allocated objects will be considered “pinned.” The compiler associates with such allocation instructions respective segments of the code following the instructions and objects allocated within one of those segments are considered to remain pinned until program execution passes beyond that segment. The garbage collector refrains from promoting any pinned object, and as a consequence, an instruction that writes a reference into an object field while that object is pinned does not need to be accompanied by a write barrier.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 15, 2002
    Date of Patent: February 14, 2006
    Assignee: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    Inventors: David L. Detlefs, William D. Clinger
  • Publication number: 20040039759
    Abstract: A compiler produces mutator code to be run with a generational garbage collector. The mutator initially allocates objects in a “young-generation” part of a garbage-collected heap and then promotes some of them to an “old-generation” part of the heap if they have remained reachable for some time. In some cases, a criterion on which its decision to promote a given object is based is whether a mutator's execution has passed a mutator-code segment that is associated with and follows the point in the code that called for the object's dynamic allocation. The compiler output designates certain of the mutator's dynamic-allocation instructions as being ones whose resultant allocated objects will be considered “pinned.” The compiler associates with such allocation instructions respective segments of the code following the instructions. In those code segments, respective initially allocated objects are considered to remain pinned.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 15, 2002
    Publication date: February 26, 2004
    Inventors: David L. Detlefs, William D. Clinger