Lambda the Ultimate

A Garbage-Collecting Typed Assembly Language. Chris Hawblitzel; Heng Huang; Lea Wittie; Juan Chen.

Abstract Typed assembly languages usually support heap allocation safely, but often rely on an external garbage collector to deallocate objects from the heap and prevent unsafe dangling pointers. Even if the external garbage collector is provably correct, verifying the safety of the interaction between TAL programs and garbage collection is nontrivial. This paper introduces a typed assembly language whose type system is expressive enough to type-check a Cheney-queue copying garbage collector, so that ordinary programs and garbage collection can co-exist and interact inside a single typed language. The only built-in types for memory are linear types describing individual memory words, so that TAL programmers can define their own object layouts, method table layouts, heap layouts, and memory management techniques.

The TAL-GC proofs can be found here.

"... As the Erlang DCC is less than a quarter of the size of a similar C++/CORBA implementation, the product development in Erlang should be fast, and the code maintainable. We conclude that Erlang and associated libraries are suitable for the rapid development of maintainable and highly reliable distributed products."

Are High-level Languages suitable for Robust Telecoms Software? (pdf) also High-Level Techniques for Distributed Telecommunications Software