Article

Experience with safe manual memory-management in cyclone

Authors:

Greg Morrisett,

Trevor JimAuthors Info & Claims

ISMM '04: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management

Pages 73 - 84

https://doi.org/10.1145/1029873.1029883

Published: 24 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The goal of the Cyclone project is to investigate type safety for low-level languages such as C. Our most difficult challenge has been providing programmers control over memory management while retaining type safety. This paper reports on our experience trying to integrate and effectively use two previously proposed, type-safe memory management mechanisms: statically-scoped regions and unique 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 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.

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Cited By

Marshall DOrchard D(2024)Functional Ownership through Fractional UniquenessProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498488:OOPSLA1(1040-1070)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
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Elsman M(2024)Explicit Effects and Effect Constraints in ReMLProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329218:POPL(2370-2394)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
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Cui MXu HTian HZhou Y(2024)rCanary: Detecting Memory Leaks Across Semi-Automated Memory Management Boundary in RustIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.344362450:9(2472-2484)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2024
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Index Terms

Experience with safe manual memory-management in cyclone
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Dynamic compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Polymorphism
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISMM '04: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management

October 2004

182 pages

ISBN:1581139454

DOI:10.1145/1029873

General Chair:
David F. Bacon
IBM Research
,
Program Chair:
Amer Diwan
University of Colorado

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 October 2004

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ISMM04

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ISMM04: 2004 International Symposium on Memory Management ( in conjunction with OOPSLA 2004 Conference )

October 24 - 25, 2004

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 72 of 156 submissions, 46%

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Elsman M(2024)Explicit Effects and Effect Constraints in ReMLProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329218:POPL(2370-2394)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632921
Cui MXu HTian HZhou Y(2024)rCanary: Detecting Memory Leaks Across Semi-Automated Memory Management Boundary in RustIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.344362450:9(2472-2484)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3443624
Arvidsson ECastegren EClebsch SDrossopoulou SNoble JParkinson MWrigstad T(2023)Reference Capabilities for Flexible Memory ManagementProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228467:OOPSLA2(1363-1393)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622846
Marshall DVollmer MOrchard D(2022)Linearity and Uniqueness: An Entente CordialeProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-99336-8_13(346-375)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99336-8_13
Pearce D(2021)A Lightweight Formalism for Reference Lifetimes and Borrowing in RustACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/344342043:1(1-73)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3443420
Racordon DBuchs DPearce DMayerhofer TSteimann F(2018)A practical type system for safe aliasingProceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3276604.3276612(133-146)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2018
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Nguyen KWang KBu YFang LXu G(2018)Understanding and Combating Memory Bloat in Managed Data-Intensive SystemsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/316262626:4(1-41)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2018
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Bruno ROliveira LFerreira P(2017)NG2C: pretenuring garbage collection with dynamic generations for HotSpot big data applicationsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3156685.309227252:9(2-13)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2017
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Parkinson MVytiniotis DVaswani KCosta MDeligiannis PMcDermott DBlankstein ABalkind J(2017)Project snowflake: non-blocking safe manual memory management in .NETProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31418791:OOPSLA(1-25)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
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