Abstract
Activation records or frames of function calls, in a functional programming implementation, are either maintained in a stack or in heap. A frame is usually treated alive till the function returns, though long before that its requirement may have been over.
In this paper, we define the concept of disposing a frame at earliest point in time and do dispose a frame as soon as we are sure that it will no longer be required. To do this we first construct a finite automaton from the program text and use this automaton to guide the frame disposal. We also prove that the disposal strategy is correct.
The advantages are many. It reduces the size of root-set from which the garbage collector starts pointer-chasing to scan the live data. It also delays the occurrences of garbage collection and in the process may improve upon the number of such occurrences in a program execution.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Satpathy, M., Sanyal, A., Venkatesh, G. (1995). An automaton-driven frame disposal algorithm and its proof of correctness. In: Kanchanasut, K., Lévy, JJ. (eds) Algorithms, Concurrency and Knowledge. ACSC 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1023. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60688-2_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60688-2_37
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