Safe manual memory management in Cyclone

@article{citeulike:779109, abstract = {The goal of the Cyclone project is to investigate how to make a low-level C-like language safe. Our most difficult challenge has been providing programmers with control over memory management while retaining safety. This paper describes our experience trying to integrate and use effectively two previously-proposed, safe memory-management mechanisms: statically-scoped regions and tracked pointers. We found that these typing mechanisms can be combined to build alternative memory-management abstractions, such as reference counted objects and arenas with dynamic lifetimes, and thus provide a flexible basis. Our experience -- porting C programs and device drivers, and building new applications for resource-constrained systems -- confirms that experts can use these features to improve memory footprint and sometimes to improve throughput when used instead of, or in combination with, conservative garbage collection.}, author = {Swamy, Nikhil and Hicks, Michael and Morrisett, Greg and Grossman, Dan and Jim, Trevor}, booktitle = {Five perspectives on modern memory management - Systems, hardware and theory}, citeulike-article-id = {779109}, doi = {10.1016/j.scico.2006.02.003}, journal = {Science of Computer Programming}, keywords = {cyclone, safe-c}, month = {October}, number = {2}, pages = {122--144}, posted-at = {2006-07-29 07:36:21}, priority = {2}, title = {Safe manual memory management in Cyclone}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2006.02.003}, volume = {62}, year = {2006} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:779109 L3 - citeulike-article-id:779109 N2 - The goal of the Cyclone project is to investigate how to make a low-level C-like language safe. Our most difficult challenge has been providing programmers with control over memory management while retaining safety. This paper describes our experience trying to integrate and use effectively two previously-proposed, safe memory-management mechanisms: statically-scoped regions and tracked pointers. We found that these typing mechanisms can be combined to build alternative memory-management abstractions, such as reference counted objects and arenas with dynamic lifetimes, and thus provide a flexible basis. Our experience -- porting C programs and device drivers, and building new applications for resource-constrained systems -- confirms that experts can use these features to improve memory footprint and sometimes to improve throughput when used instead of, or in combination with, conservative garbage collection. IS - 2 JF - Science of Computer Programming EP - 144 TI - Safe manual memory management in Cyclone VL - 62 T2 - Five perspectives on modern memory management - Systems, hardware and theory SP - 122 KW - cyclone KW - safe-c AU - Swamy, Nikhil AU - Hicks, Michael AU - Morrisett, Greg AU - Grossman, Dan AU - Jim, Trevor PY - 2006/10/01/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2006.02.003 ER -