the informal ramblings of a formal language researcher

Thursday, June 16, 2005

garbage collection in cylone

I just read a nice lil' paper that gives me hope for my own research.

It sounds like they put a region system to good use in developing a simple two-space garbage collector.

However, this blog entry indicates that they haven't figured out how to do a generational collector yet, and that they think it might require dependent types. Yowza. I've been thinking about the problem as well, but I never got to the point where it seemed like something that sophisticated would be required. . .

2 comments:

tautologico said...

Funny, I was thinking about region-based memory management and dependent types the other day...

pnkfelix said...

I got a response from the cyclone team on what they were thinking.

Its not representating the naive generational invariant (younger stuff goes into younger generations) that needs dependent types.

What requires (or may require) dependent types is encoding the remembered set invariant. This, I can believe.

However, this is sort of orthogonal to the generational issue; its something that will hold for any reasonable partitioned heap garbage collector.

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