Title
A Formal Semantics for Finalizers
Abstract
Automatic finalization is a common but inherently complex language facility that makes the garbage collection process semantically visible to client programs. With finalizers, memory management becomes more flexible, and garbage collectors can be used to recycle other resources in addition to memory. Formal language models usually ignore garbage collection, and therefore are unable to properly describe finalization. In this paper we use an operational approach to develop a new abstract model that explicitly represents memory management actions in a garbage-collected programming language based on the lambda-calculus. We formally state and prove several important properties related to memory management, and employ the model to describe and explore a semantics for finalizers.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2005
JOURNAL OF UNIVERSAL COMPUTER SCIENCE
memory management,garbage collection,finalization,semantics
Field
DocType
Volume
Garbage,Programming language,Computer science,Manual memory management,Finalizer,Memory management,Garbage collection,Finalization,Memory leak,Garbage in, garbage out
Journal
11
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
0948-695X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
12
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marcus Amorim Leal150.87
Roberto Ierusalimschy246354.25