Path-sensitive region analysis for mercury programs

Dividing the heap memory of programs into regions is the starting point of region-based memory management. In our existing work of enabling region-based memory management for Mercury, a program analysis was used to distribute data over the regions. An important goal of the analysis is to decide which program variables should end up in the same region. For a popular class of programs, it covetously puts program variables in the same region, while more memory could have been reused if they had been kept in separate ones. In this paper we define a new refined region analysis that is keen to keep program variables in separate regions by taking into account the different execution paths of a procedure. With the more precise, path-sensitive analysis we can reduce the memory footprint for several programs. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.4 [Processors]: Compilers, Memory management (garbage collection) General Terms Languages, Performance Keywords Region analysis, region-based memor...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PPDP
• Authors: Quan Phan, Gerda Janssens
• Keywords: Heap Memory, PPDP 2009, Program Variables, Programming Languages, Region-based Memory Management