Lightweight Lexical Closures for Legitimate Execution Stack Access

We propose a new language concept called "L-closures" for a running program to legitimately inspect/modify the contents of its execution stack. L-closures are lightweight lexical closures created by evaluating nested function definitions. A lexical closure can access the lexicallyscoped variables in the creation-time environment and indirect calls to it provide legitimate stack access. By using an intermediate language extended with L-closures in high-level compilers, high-level services such as garbage collection, check-pointing, multithreading and load balancing can be implemented elegantly and efficiently. Each variable accessed by an L-closure uses private and shared locations for giving the private location a chance to get a register. Operations to keep coherency with shared locations as well as operations to initialize L-closures are delayed until an L-closure is actually invoked. Because most high-level services create L-closures very frequently but call them infrequen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CC
• Authors: Masahiro Yasugi, Tasuku Hiraishi, Taiichi Yuasa
• Keywords: CC 2006, Garbage Collection, Lexical Closure, Nested Functions, System Software