01 November 2019

Our DIKU technical report Combining Region Inference and Generational Garbage Collection, with Niels Hallenberg, is available as Technical Report 2019/01.

We investigate how compiler-inferred memory regions interact with a collector that treats young and old objects differently. The MLKit implementation uses region information to support partly tag-free collection and avoid write-barrier problems. Comparisons with MLton and several MLKit configurations show that, although regions already handle many short-lived values, generations can still help. The report explains the implementation and examines its performance trade-offs.

Read the report (PDF).