Lecture

Memory Management: Part I

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In course

CS-420: Advanced compiler construction

Students learn several implementation techniques for modern functional and object-oriented programming languages. They put some of them into practice by developing key parts of a compiler and run time system for a simple functional programming language. ...

Description

This lecture covers memory management concepts such as block headers, external fragmentation, reference counting, reachability graphs, cyclic structures, mark & sweep garbage collection, allocation policies, splitting and coalescing, and reachability graph traversal. The pros and cons of reference counting are discussed, along with the uses of reference counting and the limitations it faces. The lecture also delves into mark & sweep garbage collection, its phases, marking objects, free lists, and allocation policies. The challenges of cyclic structures in reference counting are highlighted, leading to a discussion on conservative mark & sweep garbage collection and pointer identification.

Instructor

Michel Schinz

Teaching & PhD Courses Advanced compiler construction CS-420 Students learn several implementation techniques for modern functional and object-oriented programming languages. They put some of them into practice by developing key parts of a compiler and run time system for a simple functional programming language. Practice of object-oriented programming CS-108 Students improve their knowledge of Java and put it into practice by implementing a sizeable project. They learn how t

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Theoretical computer science

Programming language theory: High-level programming languages

Related concepts (32)

Tracing garbage collection

In computer programming, tracing garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management that consists of determining which objects should be deallocated ("garbage collected") by tracing which objects are reachable by a chain of references from certain "root" objects, and considering the rest as "garbage" and collecting them. Tracing garbage collection is the most common type of garbage collection – so much so that "garbage collection" often refers to tracing garbage collection, rather than other methods such as reference counting – and there are a large number of algorithms used in implementation.

Reachability

In graph theory, reachability refers to the ability to get from one vertex to another within a graph. A vertex can reach a vertex (and is reachable from ) if there exists a sequence of adjacent vertices (i.e. a walk) which starts with and ends with . In an undirected graph, reachability between all pairs of vertices can be determined by identifying the connected components of the graph. Any pair of vertices in such a graph can reach each other if and only if they belong to the same connected component; therefore, in such a graph, reachability is symmetric ( reaches iff reaches ).

Memory management

Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time. Several methods have been devised that increase the effectiveness of memory management.

Directed acyclic graph

In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called arcs), with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that following those directions will never form a closed loop. A directed graph is a DAG if and only if it can be topologically ordered, by arranging the vertices as a linear ordering that is consistent with all edge directions.

Region-based memory management

In computer science, region-based memory management is a type of memory management in which each allocated object is assigned to a region. A region, also called a zone, arena, area, or memory context, is a collection of allocated objects that can be efficiently reallocated or deallocated all at once. Like stack allocation, regions facilitate allocation and deallocation of memory with low overhead; but they are more flexible, allowing objects to live longer than the stack frame in which they were allocated.

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