A Resource-Aware Semantics and Abstract Machine for a Functional Language with Explicit Deallocation

Safe is a first-order eager language with heap regions and unusual facilities such as programmer-controlled destruction and copying of data structures. The regions are disjoint parts of the heap where the compiler may allocate data structures. Thanks to regions, a runtime garbage collector is not needed. The language and its associated type system, guaranteeing that destruction facilities and region management are done in a safe way, have been presented previously. In this paper, we start from a high-level big-step operational semantics for Safe, and in a series of semiformal steps we derive its compilation to an imperative language and imperative abstract machine. Once the memory needs of the machine are known, we enrich the semantics with memory consumption annotations and prove that the enriched semantics is correct with respect to the translation and the abstract machine. All the steps are derived in such a way that it is easy to understand the translation and to formally establish its correctness.