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International Workshop on Memory Management

IWMM 1992: Memory Management pp 248–263Cite as

An implementation of an applicative file system

  • Functional Languages
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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 637))

Abstract

A purely functional file system has been built on top of pure Scheme. It provides persistent structures and massive storage expected of file systems, without explicit side-effects like read and write. The file system becomes an additional, lazy argument to programs that would read from it, and an additional result from functions that would alter it.

Functional programming on lazy structures replaces in-place side-effects with a significant storage management problem, handled by conjoining the heap to the file system. A hardware implementation of reference counting is extended out to manage sectors, as well as the primary heap. Backing it is a garbage collector of heap and of disk (i.e. UNIX's fsck), needed only at reboot.

Research reported herein was sponsored, in part, by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DCR 90-02797.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Indiana University, 47405-4101, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Brian C. Heck & David S. Wise

Authors
  1. Brian C. Heck
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  2. David S. Wise
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Editor information

Yves Bekkers Jacques Cohen

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Heck, B.C., Wise, D.S. (1992). An implementation of an applicative file system. In: Bekkers, Y., Cohen, J. (eds) Memory Management. IWMM 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 637. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017194

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017194

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55940-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47315-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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