Automated reference-counted object recycling for real-time Java

We introduce an aspect-oriented reformulation of reference-counting that is particularly well-suited to Java applications and does not share the error-prone characteristic of manual, user-driven reference counting. We present our method in the context of the real-time specification for Java and demonstrate that it can recycle dead objects in bounded time. We apply partial evaluation to specialize the aspect-generated code, which substantially reduces the reference-counting overhead.