Signals and Threads

Memory Management with Stephen Dolan

Episode Summary

Stephen Dolan works on Jane Street’s Tools and Compilers team where he focuses on the OCaml compiler. In this episode, Stephen and Ron take a trip down memory lane, discussing how to manage computer memory efficiently and safely. They consider trade-offs between reference counting and garbage collection, the surprising gains achieved by prefetching, and how new language features like local allocation and unboxed types could give OCaml users more control over their memory.

Episode Notes

Stephen Dolan works on Jane Street’s Tools and Compilers team where he focuses on the OCaml compiler. In this episode, Stephen and Ron take a trip down memory lane, discussing how to manage computer memory efficiently and safely. They consider trade-offs between reference counting and garbage collection, the surprising gains achieved by prefetching, and how new language features like local allocation and unboxed types could give OCaml users more control over their memory.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion: