Better static memory management: improving region-based analysis of higher-order languages
PLDI '95 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1995 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Generational stack collection and profile-driven pretenuring
PLDI '98 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation
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Static memory management replaces runtime garbage collection with compile-time annotations making all memory allocations and deallocations explicit in a program. We improve upon the Tofte/Talpin region-based scheme for compile time memory management. 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 determination of where allocate and deallocate annotations are placed is made by solving a system of constraints that expresses all possible annotations. Experiments show that our approach reduces memory requirements significantly, in some cases asymptotically.