A Survey on Alternative and Hybrid Memory Management Techniques for High-Level Languages

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Alternative and Hybrid Memory Management Techniques for 
High-Level Languages"

by

Mr. Ching Hang MAK


Abstract:

It is a common idea that lower-level programming languages provide 
programmers with greater control over when memory is allocated and 
deallocated at the expense of memory safety and higher language verbosity, 
whereas higher-level programming languages guarantees memory safety by using 
automated memory management at the expense of unpredictable latency and 
increased resource usage due to automated memory reclamation. We believe 
that there is a middle ground - One where a high-level language can also 
benefit from the performance offered by low-level languages without 
introducing verbose syntax or memory bugs. This survey summarizes two lines 
of work that will be used to implement our proposed system.

The first line of work relates to the enforcement of memory safety via 
surface-language type system, rejecting programs that may introduce memory 
errors, and includes separation logic, memory regions, effects and 
capabilities, and modal memory management. The second line of work relates 
to hybrid memory management, which allows different memory strategies to be 
used within a single application based on the individual values, its type or 
the location where the value is allocated and/or deallocated. We also 
discuss relevant novel memory management techniques that motivate the use of 
a hybrid approach to memory management for general programs.

Finally, we discuss the implications that can be drawn from the existing 
works we have surveyed, and outline a line of research related to the 
implementation of a type-safe hybrid memory management technique for a 
high-level language, which will be implemented using MLx, an ML-like 
programming language developed in our lab, as the source language and 
WebAssembly as the target.


Date:                   Friday, 12 December 2025

Time:                   3:30pm - 5:30pm

Venue:                  Room 2128C
                        Lift 19

Committee Members:      Dr. Lionel Parreaux (Supervisor)
                        Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
                        Dr. Shuai Wang