Escape analysis in Java

Question

As far as I know the JVM uses escape analysis for some performance optimisations like lock coarsening and lock elision. I'm interested if there is a possibility for the JVM to decide that any particular object can be allocated on stack using escape analysis.

Some resources make me think that I am right. Is there JVMs that actually do it?

Answer 1

I don't think it does escape analysis for stack allocation. example:

public class EscapeAnalysis {

    private static class Foo {
        private int x;
        private static int counter;

        public Foo() {
            x = (++counter);
        }
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("start");
        for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i) {
            Foo foo = new Foo();
        }

        System.out.println(Foo.counter);
    }
}

with -server -verbose:gc -XX+DoEscapeAnalysis:

start
[GC 3072K->285K(32640K), 0.0065187 secs]
[GC 3357K->285K(35712K), 0.0053043 secs]
[GC 6429K->301K(35712K), 0.0030797 secs]
[GC 6445K->285K(41856K), 0.0033648 secs]
[GC 12573K->285K(41856K), 0.0050432 secs]
[GC 12573K->301K(53952K), 0.0043682 secs]
[GC 24877K->277K(53952K), 0.0031890 secs]
[GC 24853K->277K(78528K), 0.0005293 secs]
[GC 49365K->277K(78592K), 0.0006699 secs]
10000000

Allegedly JDK 7 supports stack allocation.