Objects which are eligable for finalization must be retained until
after their finalize methods are called. However, the VM must
determine the entire set of such objects before retaining any of them;
otherwise the process of retaining a given object may cause others to
become reachable and thus be considered ineligible for finalization
even though they are only reachable via other finalizable objects.
The end result of this mistake is that only a few of the objects which
are finalizable will be recognized at each GC cycle, so it requires
many such cycles to find them all, and if new objects become
finalizable at a faster rate, the VM will never catch up and
eventually run out of memory.
This patch fixes the above mistake and also includes tuning to
minimize the need for GC in low memory situations.
In the OpenJDK library, ThreadGroup maintains an array of all Threads
in that group, so the VM must explicitly remove threads as they exit
or else neither they nor any objects they reference will be eligable
for GC.
The original goal was to minimize memory usage by garbage collecting
more frequently and more comprehensively as we got closer to the heap
limit. In practice, though, this just slowed the VM to a crawl as
memory pressure increased. If an app really wants to use a lot of
memory, the VM shouldn't penalize it aside from throwing an
OutOfMemoryError if it exceeds the limit.
This is necessary to avoid name conflicts on various platforms. For
example, iOS has its own util.h, and Windows has a process.h. By
including our version as e.g. "avian/util.h", we avoid confusion with
the system version.
In type-generator, we were incorrectly calculating field offsets where
a class inherits from another class whose last field has a natural
alignment which is different from the native word size. Surprisingly,
this only popped up when I built using the Android class library on a
64-bit system.
