Unique Pointers: Performance, Burden, and Inference

Cyclone is an actively developed, type-safe, C-like programming language. Historically, language designers have either leaned toward safety or toward explicit memory management. Cyclone aims to provide the safety of a language like Java, while providing the control over data representation and memory management of low-level languages like C. Cyclone features a garbage-collected heap. However, garbage collection is undesirable in some applications – the canonical example being the embedded space. To abate concerns with garbage collection, Cyclone has featured region-based memory management for well over a year. Until now, Cyclone regions were fairly coarse grained. Developed by Dr. Michael Hicks of the University of Maryland, unique pointers are a new Cyclone construct. Unique pointers strive to regain the fine granularity of C’s malloc and free without violating safety. This paper details experiences with porting Cyclone programs to use unique pointers. Based on those experiences, this paper outlines a static, constraint-based analysis to help in the porting process. Additionally, this paper presents benchmarks comparing the performance of Cyclone programs before and after “uniquifying”.