Automatic Recognition of Uniqueness

[Ralph Becket]

It occurs to me (speaking as a non-compiler writer) that under certain
conditions it should be possible to spot when particular structures
are uniquely referenced: that is, they are used exactly once.  If you
can do this, then update-in-place becomes a possibility.  For example,
arrays are often quite handy things for graph algorithms which are
also often deterministic.  You could probably do some nifty
intra-module optimisation like this.

Or is this what people mean by compile-time garbage collection?

Anyway, is it reasonable to expect a compiler to do uniqueness
analysis and, if so, is there a plan to add it to the compiler?

Cheers,

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Becket  |  rwab1 at cam.sri.com  |  http://www.cam.sri.com/people/becket.html