Better Static Memory Management: Improving Region-Based Analysis of Higher-Order Languages

d Abstract) Alexander Aiken Manuel F¨ahndrich Raph Levieny Computer Science Division University of California, Berkeleyz Static memory managementreplaces runtime garbage collection with compile-time annotations that make all memory allocation and deallocation explicit in a program. We improve upon the Tofte/Talpin region-based scheme for compile-time memory management [TT94]. In the Tofte/Talpin approach, all values, including closures, are stored in regions. Region lifetimes coincide with lexical scope, thus forming a runtime stack of regions and eliminating the need for garbage collection. We relax the requirement that region lifetimes be lexical. Rather, regions are allocated late and deallocated as early as possible by explicit memory operations. The placement of allocation and deallocationannotations is determined by solving a system of constraints that expresses all possible annotations. Experiments show that our approach reduces memory requirements significantly, in some case...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Alexander Aiken, Manuel Fähndrich, Raph Levien
• Keywords: Compile-time Memory Management, Garbage Collection, Memory Managementreplaces Runtime, PLDI 1995, Programming Languages