Summary: Language Support for Regions
David Gay and Alex Aiken #
EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
{dgay,aiken}@cs.berkeley.edu
ABSTRACT
Region­based memory management systems structure mem­
ory by grouping objects in regions under program control.
Memory is reclaimed by deleting regions, freeing all objects
stored therein. Our compiler for C with regions, RC, pre­
vents unsafe region deletions by keeping a count of refer­
ences to each region. Using type annotations that make the
structure of a program's regions more explicit, we reduce the
overhead of reference counting from a maximum of 27% to
a maximum of 11% on a suite of realistic benchmarks. We
generalise these annotations in a region type system whose
main novelty is the use of existentially quantified abstract
regions to represent pointers to objects whose region is par­
tially or totally unknown. A distribution of RC is available
at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dgay/rc.tar.gz.

Source: Aiken, Alex - Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences