List-Heap Paging in a Distributed Virtual Memory System for Functional Languages

摘要

Functional languages have failed to become preeminent in the industrial world, because they are perceived as slow. This reputation is mostly undeserved, but some lentitude is associated with functional languages due to their interaction with memory systems. In fact, this interaction is poorly understood and not enough research is conducted on the design of memory systems for functional languages. The MT system is being developed to understand and improve the interaction between a pure list-based functional language and memory. MT provides its evaluator with an intelligent backing store implemented as an all-software paged distributed virtual memory system. Memory is divided into different spaces that are each managed independently and in parallel with program execution. In this paper, we present results obtained from observing the MT-paging traffic between the processor running the evaluator and the MT-heap's backing store in a system where the heap and stack are distributed, managed as separate address spaces, and each is allocated exclusive use of a set of frames. The results suggest that FIFO is as competitive as LRU and it is argued that FIFO should be used as the MT-heap page replacement policy. Furthermore, we present a brief argument that justifies using multiple address spaces and exclusive frame pools for the MT heap and MT stack.