Memory management with explicit regions

Abstract

Much research has been devoted to studies of and algorithms for memory management based on garbage collection or explicit allocation and deallocation. An alternative approach, region-based memory management, has been known for decades, but has not been well-studied. In a region-based system each allocation specifies a region, and memory is reclaimed by destroying a region, freeing all the storage allocated therein. We show that on a suite of allocation-intensive C programs, regions are competitive with malloc/free and sometimes substantially faster. We also show that regions support safe memory management with low overhead. Experience with our benchmarks suggests that modifying many existing programs to use regions is not difficult.

Solving Parity Games in Scala

“…a flag (removed, ¬removed). Last but not least, about the actual implementation, it is also worth mentioning that general-purpose memory allocators are very expensive as the per-operation cost floats around one hundred processor cycles [19]. Through these years many efforts have been made to improve memory allocation writing custom allocators from scratch, a process known to be difficult and error prone [5,6].…”

A Retrospective on Region-Based Memory Management

“…Another line of related work includes the work by Aiken et al on extending C with explicit region annotations [22,23] and the work on Cyclone, a safe dialect of C [27,35].…”

Component Composition for Embedded Systems Using Semantic Aspect-Oriented Programming

“…Gay and Aiken implemented a region-based extension of C called C@ which used reference counting on regions to safely allocate and deallocate regions with a minimum of overhead [99]. Using special region pointers and explicit deleteregion calls, Gay and Aiken provide a means of explicitly manipulating region-allocated memory.…”

“…Our work improves on this by providing subregions in shared regions and portal fields in subregions, so that long-lived threads can share objects without using the heap and without having memory leaks. Other systems for regions [99,100] use runtime checks to ensure memory safety. These systems are more flexible, but they do not statically ensure safety.…”