Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory

Perceus/Koka, Roc, Lobster, generational ZGC, MMTk LXR, JSC Riptide, V8 Oilpan/Sandbox, MSWasm, WasmGC, V8 cage, W^X / JIT hardening, Spectre/JIT mitigations.

15 items

Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

Perceus (Koka)

"Garbage-free" precise reference counting with reuse — in-place updates without locks, statically inserted at compile time.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

Roc — Perceus in production-ish

The biggest real-world deployment of Perceus reference counting, layered with Morphic alias analysis and "seamless slices" so functional code rarely allocates.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

Lobster — Compile-Time Reference Counting

A pragmatic language by Wouter van Oortmerssen that elides 95% of refcount ops at compile time through flow-typed lifetime analysis. Cycles handled by a cleanup at program exit.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

ZGC — Generational, Colored-Pointer GC (OpenJDK)

Java's flagship low-latency collector. Sub-millisecond pauses on multi-TB heaps via colored 64-bit pointers and concurrent everything.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

MMTk and LXR

A research framework that cleanly separates GC plans from policies, plus the LXR collector that proves a stop-the-world RC+mark-region design can beat industrial concurrent GCs on tail latency.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

JavaScriptCore — Riptide

WebKit's retreating-wavefront concurrent garbage collector. Marks objects while JS runs, throttles allocation when it falls behind, and uses logical versioning to skip clearing bitmaps.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

V8 — Orinoco + Oilpan

Chrome's two cooperating collectors. Orinoco runs V8's young-generation JS heap in parallel; Oilpan is Blink's traced C++ GC, recently hosted inside V8 as a library, learning to do generational collection with conservative stack scanning.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

V8 Sandbox

A purely software in-process sandbox for the V8 JS heap. Ban raw pointers, replace with offsets into a 1 TB sandbox region and indices into out-of-sandbox pointer tables. About 1% perf cost, enabled by default in Chrome 123. Every modern JIT is moving this direction.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

MSWasm — Memory-Safe WebAssembly

A WebAssembly extension that replaces linear memory with segments and handles. Handles are unforgeable, typed pointers carrying bounds and provenance — closely modelled on CHERI capabilities but pure software.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

WebAssembly Segmented Memory (and friends)

The CG-track answer to "what's beyond a single 4 GB linear memory?" Multiple memories shipped in Wasm 3.0 (Sep 2025). Memory64 shipped at the same time. A formal "segmented memory" proposal in the MSWasm vein has not yet entered the CG track but is influencing design.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

WasmGC

Native GC primitives in a portable bytecode. Ratified in Wasm 3.0 (Sep 2025), shipped in all major browsers by Dec 2024. Dart, Kotlin, OCaml, Java/Scala/Scheme can now compile to Wasm without bundling a GC.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

V8 Pointer Compression Cage

A direct ancestor of vm3's 32-bit slab index. V8 squeezes 64-bit pointers down to 32-bit offsets within a per-isolate 4 GB virtual region (the "cage"). Cut V8's heap by 43%, Chrome renderer memory by 20%.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

W^X Enforcement in Modern JITs

What every shipping JIT must do on day 1 to be production-grade: never have a code page that is both writable and executable to the same thread at the same time.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

Spectre Mitigations in Hosted JITs

Speculative-execution attacks haven't gone away. As of May 2026, every shipping JIT either implements index masking + bounds-check hardening, or relies on process-level Site Isolation, or both.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026
Research › Memory Management › Runtime Techniques and Sandboxed Memory ›

Android Scudo + MTE inside ART

The canonical "secure allocator inside a managed runtime." Scudo is Android's hardened native heap, used for ART's non-managed allocations (JIT code, off-heap buffers, JNI). Pairs with ARM MTE on Armv9 hardware for hardware-checked tagging.
memory-safety runtime May 18, 2026