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This article introduces a novel system for deriving upper bounds on the heap-space requirements of functional programs with garbage collection. The space cost model is based on a perfect garbage collector that immediately deallocates memory cells when they become unreachable. Heap-space bounds are derived using type-based automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA), a template-based technique that efficiently reduces bound inference to linear programming. The first technical contribution of the work is a new operational cost semantics that models a perfect garbage collector. The second technical contribution is an extension of AARA to take into account automatic deallocation. A key observation is that deallocation of a perfect collector can be modeled with destructive pattern matching if data structures are used in a linear way. However, the analysis uses destructive pattern matching to accurately model deallocation even if data is shared. The soundness of the extended AARA with respect to the new cost semantics is proven in two parts via an intermediate linear cost semantics. The analysis and the cost semantics have been implemented as an extension to Resource Aware ML (RaML). An experimental evaluation shows that the system is able to derive tight symbolic heap-space bounds for common algorithms. Often the bounds are asymptotic improvements over bounds that RaML derives without taking into account garbage collection.
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A flexible type system for fearless concurrency
This paper proposes a new type system for concurrent programs, allowing threads to exchange complex object graphs without risking destructive data races. While this goal is shared by a rich history of past work, existing solutions either rely on strictly enforced heap invariants that prohibit natural programming patterns or demand pervasive annotations even for simple programming tasks. As a result, past systems cannot express intuitively simple code without unnatural rewrites or substantial annotation burdens. Our work avoids these pitfalls through a novel type system that provides sound reasoning about separation in the heap while remaining flexible enough to support a wide range of desirable heap manipulations. This new sweet spot is attained by enforcing a heap domination invariant similarly to prior work, but tempering it by allowing complex exceptions that add little annotation burden. Our results include: (1) code examples showing that common data structure manipulations which are difficult or impossible to express in prior work are natural and direct in our system, (2) a formal proof of correctness demonstrating that well-typed programs cannot encounter destructive data races at run time, and (3) an efficient type checker implemented in Gallina and OCaml.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717554
- PAR ID:
- 10389499
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM SIGPLAN Conf. on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 458 to 473
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523443
