Memory Management

AnMemory important component of an abstract machine’s interpreter is the one dealing with memory management. If this component can be extremely simple in a physical machine, memory management in an abstract machine for a high-level language is fairly complicated and can employ a range of techniques. We will see both static and dynamic management and will examine activation records, the system stack and the heap. One section in particular is dedicated to the data structures and mechanisms used to implement scope rules. Conceptually, also garbage-collection techniques—that is, tools for the automatic recovery of memory allocated in the heap—are included in memory management. However, to make the presentation more coherent, these techniques will be explained in Sect. 8.12 , after having dealt with data types and pointers.