Automatic management of operating-system resources

  • Authors:
  • Olin Shivers

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  • Venue:
  • ICFP '97 Proceedings of the second ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

One of the attractive features of functional programming languages is that they provide automatic management of the store, in the form of garbage collection. However, the benefits of automatic resource management can be applied to other resources as well. Scsh, a systems-programming dialect of Scheme, provides automatic resource management for operating-systems structures, notably processes, I/O channels, and signal events. This kind of automatic management extends the benefits of garbage collection---modularity, robustness, simplicity, and clarity---to new sets of objects in programming, and also gives us hints as to how operating systems should be structured from the perspective of functional programming languages.