Sunday, February 17, 2013

ParaSailing without a (garbage) chute

Here is a video of a presentation on ParaSail given at Mozilla Research in Mountain View, CA a couple of weeks ago, to the folks who are developing the Rust language:

https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management-parasailing-without-a-garbage-chute/

A particular area of interest was the use of pointer-free region-based storage management which eliminates the need for a garbage collector.  Rust has per-task heaps which are garbage collected, but in a single-threaded environment, plus a global heap which is managed more like one of ParaSail's regions, where all pointers into the global heap are unique/owned pointers.  Setting such a pointer to null allows immediate reclamation of the associated storage, preventing accumulation of any garbage.

Slides are on the ParaSail google group:
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/parasail-programming-language/hMiRrQijNPg