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Empirical and analytic study of stack versus heap cost for languages with closures

Part of: JFP Research Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Andrew W. Appel  and
Zhong Shao
Andrew W. Appel
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-2087, USA
Zhong Shao
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-2087, USA
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Abstract

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We present a comprehensive analysis of all the components of creation, access and disposal of heap-allocated and stack-allocated activation records. Among our results are:

•Although stack frames are known to have a better cache read-miss rate than heap frames, our simple analytical model (backed up by simulation results) shows that the difference is too trivial to matter.

•The cache write-miss rate of heap frames is very high; we show that a variety of miss-handling strategies (exemplified by specific modern machines) can give good performance, but not all can.

•Stacks restrict the flexibility of closure representations (for higher-order functions) in important (and costly) ways.

•The extra load placed on the garbage collector by heap-allocated frames is small.

•The demands of modern programming languages make stacks complicated to implement efficiently and correctly.

Overall, the execution cost of stack-allocated and heap-allocated frames is similar; but heap frames are simpler to implement and allow very efficient first-class continuations.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 47 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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