In 2009 he was inducted as an ACM Fellow "for contributions to real-time systems and to object-oriented language design and implementation".
[6] His work on the Metronome[7] hard real-time tracing garbage collector became the basis for the IBM WebSphere Real Time Java virtual machine,[8] which was used in the software for the Navy's DDG 1000 Destroyer.
[9] The original research was subsequently selected for the 2013 Most Influential Paper Award of the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.
[10] His work on garbage collecting cyclic structures[11] in reference counted systems has been used in a number of scripting languages, including PHP.
[12] In 2013 he published the first garbage collector implemented completely in hardware,[clarification needed][13] which was selected as an ACM Research Highlight.