Garbage-Collection Safety for Region-Based Type-Polymorphic Programs

Explore a conference talk from PLDI 2023 that addresses a critical issue in garbage collection safety for region-based type-polymorphic programs. Delve into Martin Elsman's presentation on the challenges of combining region inference with reference-tracing garbage collection in higher-order polymorphic programs. Learn about the soundness problem identified in existing theoretical developments and its practical implications. Discover the proposed solution: a modified region type-system that captures garbage-collection effects, even for polymorphic higher-order code. Understand how this new approach simplifies function region type-schemes, enables the combination of region-based memory management with partly tag-free reference-tracing garbage collection, and rectifies previously derived work based on erroneous published results. Gain insights into the implications for region inference and region-representation analyses in light of this new type system.