Thomas, Stephen and Jones, Richard (1994) Garbage Collecting Shared Environment Closure Reducers. Technical report. Computing Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury
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Abstract
Shared environment closure reducers such as Fairbairn and Wray's TIM incur a comparatively low cost when creating a suspension, and so provide an elegant method for implementing lazy functional evaluation. However, comparatively little attention has been given to the problems involved in identifying which portions of a shared environment are needed (and ignoring those which are not) during a garbage collection. Proper consideration of this issue has subtle consequences when implementing a storage manager in a TIM-like system. We describe the problem and illustrate the negative consequences of ignoring it. We go on to describe a solution in which the compiler determines statically which portions of that code's environment are required for each piece of code it generates, and emits information to assist the run-time storage manager to scavenge environments selectively. We also describe a technique for expressing this information directly as executable code, and demonstrate that a garbage collector implemented in this way can perform significantly better than an equivalent, table-driven interpretive collector.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Technical report) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled keywords: | garbage collection, functional programming, compilers |
| Subjects: | Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming, |
| Divisions: | Faculties > Science Technology and Medical Studies > School of Computing > Theoretical Computing Group Faculties > Science Technology and Medical Studies > School of Computing > Systems Architecture Group |
| Depositing User: | Mark Wheadon |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Aug 2009 19:24 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Aug 2009 19:24 |
| Resource URI: | http://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/21162 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes) |
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