[Tinycc-devel] Region Based Memory Management

[Matt Davis]

Hello, I am starting work on my Computer Science PhD, and want to target
something both memory related and compiler related.  I have been considering
targeting region based memory management, and I think TinyCC would provide a
cool framework to conduct such research.  Likewise, I want the result of my
implementations to be FOSS.  With that said, I am no expert in this field, but I
am aware that region based memory management is not exactly the best for an
imperative language, due to pointer aliasing.   However, I do believe such
compiler-driven memory-management can be implemented, as the Cyclone project
does such [1].  I would like to target my optimizations towards automatically
driven by the compiler versus language annotations.  In addition, I also want to
implement such functionality to benefit memory usage, application safety, and
improve memory performance (consequentially power management), but within the
embedded/small-memory world.

I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on region based memory
management for imperative languages.  Of course it isn't impossible, but the
benefit might not be that great, or even guaranteed for an application.

-Matt


[1] http://cyclone.thelanguage.org