New report: Garbage-Collection Safety for Polymorphic Programs
29 December 2022
My DIKU technical report Garbage-Collection Safety for Region-Based Type-Polymorphic Programs examines a subtle problem in combining region-based memory management with garbage collection.
Earlier theory could allow the collector to encounter a dangling pointer in higher-order, polymorphic programs, and the problem also appeared in an implementation. The report develops a revised type system that accounts for garbage-collection effects and explains how to adapt region inference and its supporting analyses. This restores the safety guarantee while allowing simpler type schemes for functions.