In
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...
, 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. In typical implementations, all objects in a region are allocated in a single contiguous range of memory addresses, similarly to how stack frames are typically allocated.
Example
As a simple example, consider the following
C code which allocates and then deallocates a
linked list
In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory. Instead, each element points to the next. It is a data structure consisting of a collection of nodes whi ...
data structure:
Region *r = createRegion();
ListNode *head = NULL;
for (int i = 1; i <= 1000; i++)
// ...
// (use list here)
// ...
destroyRegion(r);
Although it required many operations to construct the linked list, it can be quickly deallocated in a single operation by destroying the region in which the nodes were allocated. There is no need to traverse the list.
Implementation
Simple explicit regions are straightforward to implement; the following description is based on Hanson.
[
] Each region is implemented as a
linked list
In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory. Instead, each element points to the next. It is a data structure consisting of a collection of nodes whi ...
of large blocks of memory; each block should be large enough to serve many allocations. The current block maintains a pointer to the next free position in the block, and if the block is filled, a new one is allocated and added to the list. When the region is deallocated, the next-free-position pointer is reset to the beginning of the first block, and the list of blocks can be reused for the next allocated region. Alternatively, when a region is deallocated, its list of blocks can be appended to a global freelist from which other regions may later allocate new blocks. With either case of this simple scheme, it is not possible to deallocate individual objects in regions.
The overall cost per allocated byte of this scheme is very low; almost all allocations involve only a comparison and an update to the next-free-position pointer. Deallocating a region is a constant-time operation, and is done rarely. Unlike in typical
garbage collection systems, there is no need to tag data with its type.
History and concepts
The basic concept of regions is very old, first appearing as early as 1967 in Douglas T. Ross's AED Free Storage Package, in which memory was partitioned into a hierarchy of zones; each zone had its own allocator, and a zone could be freed all-at-once, making zones usable as regions. In 1976, the
PL/I
PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It ...
standard included the AREA data type. In 1990, Hanson demonstrated that explicit regions in C (which he called arenas) could achieve time performance per allocated byte superior to even the fastest-known heap allocation mechanism.
[ Explicit regions were instrumental in the design some early C-based software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server, which calls them pools, and the ]PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...
database management system, which calls them memory contexts. Like traditional heap allocation, these schemes do not provide memory safety; it is possible for a programmer to access a region after it is deallocated through a dangling pointer, or to forget to deallocate a region, causing a memory leak
In computer science, a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. A memory leak may also happen when an object ...
.
Region inference
In 1988, researchers began investigating how to use regions for safe memory allocation by introducing the concept of region inference, where the creation and deallocation of regions, as well as the assignment of individual static allocation expressions to particular regions, is inserted by the compiler at compile-time. The compiler is able to do this in such a way that it can guarantee dangling pointers and leaks do not occur.
In an early work by Ruggieri and Murtagh, a region is created at the beginning of each function and deallocated at the end. They then use data flow analysis to determine a lifetime for each static allocation expression, and assign it to the youngest region that contains its entire lifetime.
In 1994, this work was generalized in a seminal work by Tofte and Talpin to support type polymorphism
In programming language theory and type theory, polymorphism is the provision of a single interface to entities of different types or the use of a single symbol to represent multiple different types.: "Polymorphic types are types whose operatio ...
and higher-order functions in Standard ML
Standard ML (SML) is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of ...
, a functional programming
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...
language, using a different algorithm based on type inference
Type inference refers to the automatic detection of the type of an expression in a formal language. These include programming languages and mathematical type systems, but also natural languages in some branches of computer science and linguistics. ...
and the theoretical concepts of polymorphic region type
In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as zones, lands or territories, are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics ( physical geography), human impact characteristics ( human geography), and the interaction of humanity an ...
s and the region calculus. Their work introduced an extension of the lambda calculus
Lambda calculus (also written as ''λ''-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation t ...
including regions, adding two constructs:
:''e''1 at ρ: Compute the result of the expression ''e''1 and store it in region ρ;
:letregion ρ in ''e''2 end: Create a region and bind it to ρ; evaluate ''e''2; then deallocate the region.
Due to this syntactic structure, regions are ''nested'', meaning that if r2 is created after r1, it must also be deallocated before r1; the result is a ''stack'' of regions. Moreover, regions must be deallocated in the same function in which they are created. These restrictions were relaxed by Aiken et al.
This extended lambda calculus was intended to serve as a provably memory-safe intermediate representation
An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good ...
for compiling Standard ML programs into machine code, but building a translator that would produce good results on large programs faced a number of practical limitations which had to be resolved with new analyses, including dealing with recursive calls, tail calls, and eliminating regions which contained only a single value. This work was completed in 1995 and integrated into the ML Kit, a version of ML based on region allocation in place of garbage collection. This permitted a direct comparison between the two on medium-sized test programs, yielding widely varying results ("between 10 times faster and four times slower") depending on how "region-friendly" the program was; compile times, however, were on the order of minutes. The ML Kit was eventually scaled to large applications with two additions: a scheme for separate compilation of modules, and a hybrid technique combining region inference with tracing garbage collection.[
]
Generalization to new language environments
Following the development of ML Kit, regions began to be generalized to other language environments:
* Various extensions to the C programming language:
** The safe C dialect Cyclone, which among many other features adds support for explicit regions, and evaluates the impact of migrating existing C applications to use them.
** An extension to C called RC was implemented that uses explicitly-managed regions, but also uses reference counting on regions to guarantee memory safety by ensuring that no region is freed prematurely. Regions decrease the overhead of reference counting, since references internal to regions don't require counts to be updated when they're modified. RC includes an explicit static type system for regions that allows some reference count updates to be eliminated.
** A restriction of C called Control-C limits programs to use regions (and only a single region at a time), as part of its design to statically ensure memory safety.
* Regions were implemented for a subset of Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
, and became a critical component of memory management in Real time Java, which combines them with ownership types to demonstrate object encapsulation and eliminate runtime checks on region deallocation. More recently, a semi-automatic system was proposed for inferring regions in embedded real-time Java applications, combining a compile-time static analysis, a runtime region allocation policy, and programmer hints. Regions are a good fit for real-time computing
Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constra ...
because their time overhead is statically predictable, without the complexity of incremental garbage collection.
* They were implemented for the logic programming
Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of log ...
languages Prolog
Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily a ...
and Mercury by extending Tofte and Talpin's region inference model to support backtracking and cuts.
* Region-based storage management is used throughout the parallel programming language ParaSail
Parasailing, also known as parascending, paraskiing or parakiting, is a recreational kiting activity where a person is towed behind a vehicle while attached to a specially designed canopy wing that resembles a parachute, known as a parasail w ...
. Due to the lack of explicit pointers in ParaSail, there is no need for reference counting.
Disadvantages
Systems using regions may experience issues where regions become very large before they are deallocated and contain a large proportion of dead data; these are commonly called "leaks" (even though they are eventually freed). Eliminating leaks may involve restructuring the program, typically by introducing new, shorter-lifetime regions. Debugging this type of problem is especially difficult in systems using region inference, where the programmer must understand the underlying inference algorithm, or examine the verbose intermediate representation, to diagnose the issue. Tracing garbage collectors are more effective at deallocating this type of data in a timely manner without program changes; this was one justification for hybrid region/GC systems.[ On the other hand, tracing garbage collectors can also exhibit subtle leaks, if references are retained to data which will never be used again.
Region-based memory management works best when the number of regions is relatively small and each contains many objects; programs that contain many sparse regions will exhibit internal fragmentation, leading to wasted memory and a time overhead for region management. Again, in the presence of region inference this problem can be more difficult to diagnose.
]
Hybrid methods
As mentioned above, RC uses a hybrid of regions and reference counting, limiting the overhead of reference counting since references internal to regions don't require counts to be updated when they're modified. Similarly, some ''mark-region'' hybrid methods combine tracing garbage collection with regions; these function by dividing the heap into regions, performing a mark-sweep pass in which any regions containing live objects are marked, and then freeing any unmarked regions. These require continual defragmentation to remain effective.[
]
References
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Memory management