Partner event: You might not need your garbage collector

Proposed by Proust in his PhD thesis (2017), the as-static-as-possible (ASAP) approach to memory management aims to minimize the runtime overhead associated with deallocating inaccessible heap blocks by lifting as much work as possible to the compiler. On paper this means that a language implementing ASAP: (i) avoids the execution costs associated with a large automatic garbage collector (GC); (ii) keeps programmers away from C-style malloc/free primitives; and (iii) retains a simple type-system, free from linear types and region information. In practice, implementing the approach is no small challenge and there have been no successful attempts to integrate the approach into a real-world compiler as of June 2022. Based on experiences gained writing a machine-level prototype implementation for a small functional language, this talk will introduce the core concepts underlying ASAP, discuss paths towards implementation and hint at possible solutions to outstanding issues with the approach, both theoretical and practical.

Brief speaker bio: Nathan Corbyn is a first-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford. His research interests are largely centered around programming language theory, type theory, category theory, and compiler construction with a particular interest in the intersection. His recent work has focused on the theory and applications of free extensions of algebras.