US Patent 7089272 Specializing write-barriers for objects in a garbage collected heap

A technique is provided for reducing the number of write barriers executed in mutator code without compromising garbage collector performance. Advantageously, a compiler generates two forms of a mutator code—a first version with write barriers and a second version substantially without write barriers. In operation, the first version of the code may be accessed by a vtable in a “mature” near-class and the second version may be accessed by a vtable in a “nascent” near-class. According to the invention, mapping of functionally equivalent points in the first and second versions of the mutator code may be facilitated by an associated pcmap. Further, each of the first and second versions may also be associated with a respective nr_map that facilitates mapping functionally equivalent points within different branches of guard code sequences corresponding to reference-writes to non-receiver objects.