[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
11:45-1:15
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Felix Klock

The Space Efficiency of Garbage Collection with a Partitioned Heap

Many virtual machine implementations employ a generational garbage
collection system to perform automated memory management.  Researchers
have experimented with several variants of generational garbage
collection, all of which maintain some partitioning of the heap and
employ some policy to determine which partitions to garbage collect.

In this talk, I will first describe one abstract machine that
represents a large class of such garbage collection algorithms, and
prove that it computes the same answers as an abstract machine with no
heap partitioning.  Then I will describe a second abstract machine
representing the class of 2-space younger-first garbage collectors,
prove that it computes the same answers as the other machines, and
prove that it and the machine with no heap partitioning are in the
same space complexity class (in the sense of Clinger's "Proper Tail
Recursion and Space Efficiency").  Finally I will discuss
research-in-progress on modeling the Garbage-First collector of
Detlefs et al. in this same framework.

Upcoming Events:

4/ 6 Eli Barzilay: Implementing Syntactic Reflection in Nuprl

--Mitch