Implicit Memory Management for SaC

While almost all functional languages rely on garbage col- lection for implicit memory management, the needs of efficient array processing are better suited by reference counting. The opportunities to reclaim unused memory immediately and to implement functionally sound array operations by destructive in-place updates turn out to be essential for approaching the performance achieved by imperative lan- guages. In this paper we outline the realization of implicit memory management in the functional array language SaC. Starting with basic schemes for the introduction of memory management and reference counting instructions into SaC code, the emphasis is laid on a range of optimizations that aim at reducing runtime overhead and exploiting memory reuse opportuni- ties.