Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a Safe Runtime System in Cyclone
Matthew T. Fluet, Daniel Wang · 2004
Scheme interpreter and a copying garbage collector that manages the memory allocated by the interpreter. The entire system including the garbage collector is implemented in Cyclone [11], a safe dialect of C, which supports safe and explicit memory management. We describe the high-level design of the system, report preliminary benchmarks, and compare our approach to other Scheme systems. Our preliminary benchmarks demonstrate that one can build a system with reasonable performance when compared to other approaches that guarantee safety. More importantly we can significantly reduce the amount of unsafe code needed to implement the system. Our benchmarks also identify some key algorithmic bottlenecks related to our approach that we hope to address in the future.