We have had a long term plan (which has not fructified until now) of implementing a static analysis for improving garbage collection. Our paper in TOPLAS (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1290521) describes our early work. The main bottle neck for our purpose is a good pointer analysis and we have shifted our focus to that. Nothing shareable yet on that front.
It may still be worthwhile implementing it using the existing pointer analysis but I don't have the bandwidth for it. If someone wants to explore improving dynamic allocation, this may be a good beginning. I will be very happy to provide information. Uday Khedker. Matt Davis wrote, On Friday 27 August 2010 06:39 AM:
Hello, I am just trying to settle down on my PhD Computer Science dissertation topic. I want something low-level, compiler related, and more so useful/practical. I am considering region-based memory management, to show memory efficiency and safety. For imperative languages, such as c, this is rather difficult from static-analysis alone (e.g. aliasing and weak-typing). However, I do believe region-based management is possible. If I were to take something of this nature on for my topic, would it be valuable research, and is it even worth the effort? I am by far any kind of compiler guru, and figured you all might know best. The other option, would be to implement such concepts in a research language, which can still be interesting, but I'm not sure how practical. -Matt
