Memory Management with Use-Counted Regions

We introduce a new region-based memory management technique that allows flexible memory usagepatterns and is provably safe. Our technique is explicit and manual like C’s malloc and free, and itallows programmers to exert a similar degree of control over the program behavior. Our method is quitesimple in spite of this expressiveness and safety.We apply the technique to a small functional language to formally describe the core concepts, proveits safety, and argue its usability and efficiency analytically. In particular, we show that the system canefficiently encode more rigid, traditional regions whose lifetime is bounded by that of a stack frame. Wealso show that the technique works nicely with multi-threaded and imperative programs.