Towards region-based memory management for Go

Abstract

Region-based memory management aims to lower the cost of deallocation through bulk processing: instead of recovering the memory of each object separately, it recovers the memory of a region containing many objects. It relies on static analysis to determine the set of memory regions needed by a program, the program points at which each region should be created and removed, and, for each memory allocation, the region that should supply the memory. The concurrent language Go has features that pose interesting challenges for this analysis. We present a novel design for region-based memory management for Go, combining static analysis, to guide region creation, and lightweight runtime bookkeeping, to help control reclamation. The main advantage of our approach is that it greatly limits the amount of re-work that must be done after each change to the program source code, making our approach more practical than existing RBMM systems. Our prototype implementation covers most of the sequential fragment of Go, and preliminary results are encouraging.