Abstract
Modern programming languages and operating systems use heap memory that allows allocation and deallocation of memory to be decoupled, so they don’t follow a stack discipline. Axelsen and Glück have presented a reversible heap manager where allocation and deallocation are each other’s logical inverses: Freeing a block of memory is done by running the allocation procedure backwards.
Axelsen and Glück use this heap manager to sketch implementation of a simple reversible functional language where pattern matching a constructor is the inverse of construction, so pattern-matching implies deallocation. This requires the language to be linear: A pointer can not be copied and it can only be eliminated by deallocating the node to which it points.
We overcome this limitation by adding reference counts to nodes: Copying a pointer to a node increases the reference count of the node and eliminating a pointer decreases the reference count. We show reversible implementations of operations on nodes with reference counts. We then show these operations can be used when implementing a reversible functional language RCFUN to the reversible imperative language Janus.
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Mogensen, T.Æ. (2014). Reference Counting for Reversible Languages. In: Yamashita, S., Minato, Si. (eds) Reversible Computation. RC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8507. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08494-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08494-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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