Region Memory Management and Generational GC in JFP
22 February 2021
Our paper Integrating region memory management and tag-free generational garbage collection, with Niels Hallenberg, has been published in the Journal of Functional Programming.
Region inference and generational garbage collection both reclaim short-lived values efficiently, but can they work well together? We present a combined design in MLKit that uses region information to avoid write-barrier overhead and some runtime tags. The paper develops formal properties and evaluates several memory-management configurations. The benchmarks show that adding generations can improve on non-generational collection, while also revealing the memory cost of fragmentation.