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459
Dynamic storage allocation: A survey and critical review
, 1995
"... Dynamic memory allocation has been a fundamental part of most computer systems since roughly 1960, and memory allocation is widely considered to be either a solved problem or an insoluble one. In this survey, we describe a variety of memory allocator designs and point out issues relevant to their de ..."
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Cited by 241 (6 self)
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Dynamic memory allocation has been a fundamental part of most computer systems since roughly 1960, and memory allocation is widely considered to be either a solved problem or an insoluble one. In this survey, we describe a variety of memory allocator designs and point out issues relevant to their design and evaluation. We then chronologically survey most of the literature on allocators between 1961 and 1995. (Scores of papers are discussed, in varying detail, and over 150 references are given.) We argue that allocator designs have been unduly restricted by an emphasis on mechanism, rather than policy, while the latter is more important; higher-level strategic issues are still more important, but have not been given much attention. Most theoretical analyses and empirical allocator evaluations to date have relied on very strong assumptions of randomness and independence, but real program behavior exhibits important regularities that must be exploited if allocators are to perform well in practice.
Typed Memory Management in a Calculus of Capabilities
, 2000
"... Region-based memory management is an alternative to standard tracing garbage collection that makes potentially dangerous operations such as memory deallocation explicit but verifiably safe. In this article, we present a new compiler intermediate language, called the Capability Calculus, that supp ..."
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Cited by 209 (21 self)
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Region-based memory management is an alternative to standard tracing garbage collection that makes potentially dangerous operations such as memory deallocation explicit but verifiably safe. In this article, we present a new compiler intermediate language, called the Capability Calculus, that supports region-based memory management and enjoys a provably safe type system. Unlike previous region-based type systems, region lifetimes need not be lexically scoped and yet the language may be checked for safety without complex analyses. Therefore, our type system may be deployed in settings such as extensible operating systems where both the performance and safety of untrusted code is important.
Orthogonally Persistent Object Systems
- VLDB JOURNAL
, 1995
"... Persistent Application Systems (PASs) are of increasing social and economic importance. They have the potential to be long-lived, concurrently accessed and consist of large bodies of data and programs. Typical examples of PASs are CAD/CAM systems, office automation, CASE tools, software engineer ..."
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Cited by 157 (26 self)
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Persistent Application Systems (PASs) are of increasing social and economic importance. They have the potential to be long-lived, concurrently accessed and consist of large bodies of data and programs. Typical examples of PASs are CAD/CAM systems, office automation, CASE tools, software engineering environments and patient-care support systems in hospitals. Orthogonally persistent object systems are intended to provide improved support for the design, construction, maintenance and operation of PASs. The persistence abstraction allows the creation and manipulation of data in a manner that is independent of its lifetime thereby integrating the database view of information with the programming language view. This yields a number of advantages in terms of orthogonal design and programmer productivity which are beneficial for PASs. Design principles have been proposed for persistent systems. By following these principles, languages that provide persistence as a basic abstract...
Memory Management with Explicit Regions
, 1998
"... 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 wellstudied. In a region-based system each allo ..."
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Cited by 133 (6 self)
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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 wellstudied. 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. 1 Introduction The two most popular memory management techniques are explicit allocation and deallocation, as in C's malloc/free, and various forms of garbagecollection [Wil92]. Both have well-known advantages and disadvantages, discussed further below. A t...
Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection
, 1993
"... We call a garbage collector conservative if it has only partial information about the location of pointers, and is thus forced to treat arbitrary bit patterns as though they might be pointers, in at least some cases. We show that some very inexpensive, but previously unused techniques can have drama ..."
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Cited by 126 (6 self)
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We call a garbage collector conservative if it has only partial information about the location of pointers, and is thus forced to treat arbitrary bit patterns as though they might be pointers, in at least some cases. We show that some very inexpensive, but previously unused techniques can have dramatic impact on the effectiveness of conservative garbage collectors in reclaiming memory. Our most significant observation is that static data that appears to point to the heap should not result in misidentified references to the heap. The garbage collector has enough information to allocate around such references. We also observe that programming style has a significant impact on the amount of spuriously retained storage, typically even if the collector is not terribly conservative. Some fairly common C and C programming styles significantly decrease the effectiveness of any garbage collector. These observations suffice to explain some of the different assessments of conservative collection that have appeared in the literature.
WebBase : A repository of web pages
- In Proceedings of the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference
, 1999
"... In this paper, we study the problem of constructing and maintaining a large shared repository of web pages. We discuss the unique characteristics of such a repository, propose an architecture, and identify its functional modules. We focus on the storage manager module, and illustrate how traditional ..."
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Cited by 109 (10 self)
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In this paper, we study the problem of constructing and maintaining a large shared repository of web pages. We discuss the unique characteristics of such a repository, propose an architecture, and identify its functional modules. We focus on the storage manager module, and illustrate how traditional techniques for storage and indexing can be tailored to meet the requirements of a web repository. To evaluate design alternatives, we also present experimental results from a prototype repository called WebBase, that is currently being developed at Stanford University.
Runtime support for type-safe dynamic Java classes
- In Proceedings of the Fourteenth European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
, 2000
"... Modern software must evolve in response to changing conditions. In the most widely used programming environments, code is static and cannot change at runtime. This poses problems for applications, that have limited down-time. More support is needed for dynamic evolution. In this paper we present an ..."
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Cited by 108 (4 self)
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Modern software must evolve in response to changing conditions. In the most widely used programming environments, code is static and cannot change at runtime. This poses problems for applications, that have limited down-time. More support is needed for dynamic evolution. In this paper we present an approach for supporting dynamic evolution of Java programs. In this approach, Java programs can evolve by changing their components, namely classes, during their execution. Changes in a class lead to changes in the its instances, thereby allowing evolution of both code and state. The approach promotes compatibility with existing Java applications, and maintains the security and type safety controls imposed by Java’s dynamic linking mechanism. Experimental analyses of our implementation indicate that the implementation imposes a moderate performance penalty relative to the unmodified virtual machine.
Language Support for Regions
- In Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI
, 2001
"... Region-based memory management systems structure memory by grouping objects in regions under program control. Memory is reclaimed by deleting regions, freeing all objects stored therein. Our compiler for C with regions, RC, prevents unsafe region deletions by keeping a count of references to each re ..."
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Cited by 104 (11 self)
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Region-based memory management systems structure memory by grouping objects in regions under program control. Memory is reclaimed by deleting regions, freeing all objects stored therein. Our compiler for C with regions, RC, prevents unsafe region deletions by keeping a count of references to each region. Using type annotations that make the structure of a program's regions more explicit, we reduce the overhead of reference counting from a maximum of 27% to a maximum of 11% on a suite of realistic benchmarks. We generalise these annotations in a region type system whose main novelty is the use of existentially quantified abstract regions to represent pointers to objects whose region is partially or totally unknown. A distribution of RC is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dgay/rc.tar.gz.
Declarative debugging for lazy functional languages
, 1998
"... Lazy functional languages are declarative and allow the programmer to write programs where operational issues such as the evaluation order are left implicit. It is desirable to maintain a declarative view also during debugging so as to avoid burdening the programmer with operational details, for e ..."
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Cited by 100 (8 self)
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Lazy functional languages are declarative and allow the programmer to write programs where operational issues such as the evaluation order are left implicit. It is desirable to maintain a declarative view also during debugging so as to avoid burdening the programmer with operational details, for example concerning the actual evaluation order which tends to be difficult to follow. Conventional debugging techniques focus on the operational behaviour of a program and thus do not constitute a suitable foundation for a general-purpose debugger for lazy functional languages. Yet, the only readily available, general-purpose debugging tools for this class of languages are simple, operational tracers. This thesis presents a technique for debugging lazy functional programs declaratively and an efficient implementation of a declarative debugger for a large subset of Haskell. As far as we know, this is the first implementation of such a debugger which is sufficiently efficient to be useful in practice. Our approach is to construct a declarative trace which hides the operational details,
THE INLINED REFERENCE MONITOR APPROACH TO SECURITY POLICY ENFORCEMENT
, 2004
"... Embedding security enforcement code into applications is an alternative to tradi-tional security mechanisms. This dissertation supports the thesis that such Inlined Reference Monitors, or IRMs, offer many advantages and are a practical option in modern systems. IRMs enable flexible general-purpose e ..."
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Cited by 99 (1 self)
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Embedding security enforcement code into applications is an alternative to tradi-tional security mechanisms. This dissertation supports the thesis that such Inlined Reference Monitors, or IRMs, offer many advantages and are a practical option in modern systems. IRMs enable flexible general-purpose enforcement of security policies, and they are especially well suited for extensible systems and other non-traditional platforms. IRMs can exhibit similar, or even better, performance than previous approaches and can help increase assurance by contributing little to the size of a trusted computing base. Moreover, IRMs ’ agility in distributed settings allows for their cost-effective and trustworthy deployment in many scenarios. In this dissertation, IRM implementations are derived from formal automata-based specifications of security policies. Then, an IRM toolkit for Java is described in detail. This Java IRM toolkit uses an imperative policy language that allows a security policy, in combination with the details of its enforcement, to be given in a single complete specification. Various example policies, including the stack-inspection policy of Java, illustrate the approach. These examples shed light on
