Abstract
In a static typechecking language, such as ML, the type information produced by the typechecker can be forgotten during execution. But in many cases, a minimal type information (tag) is needed for the Garbage Collector (GC). In this paper, I propose a simple, safe and efficient GC algorithm which does not use any tags to distinguish immediate values and pointers.
This GC is a conservative Mark&Sweep (which does not move objects) with ambiguous roots (there is a possibility of ambiguity between immediate values and pointers). It is used for a runtime library added to C for an ML compiler to C (CeML) where basic data types are identical to those in C (int, float). However the GC uses a disambiguating strategy which is shown to be safe. It can be used also for other polymorphic languages with static typechecking and uniform data representation.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Chailloux, E. (1992). A conservative garbage collector with ambiguous roots for static typechecking languages. In: Bekkers, Y., Cohen, J. (eds) Memory Management. IWMM 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 637. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017192
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017192
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