A perspective on the AHA project

The Amortised Heap Space Usage Analysis (AHA) project [4] aims at statically estimating heap consumption of programs. At this workshop we will give an overview of our achievements and we will comment on our current research and future plans. Memory management is a key concern for many kinds of applications. An important aspect of memory management is a having a safe estimation of the amount of memory required for program execution. Overallocation of memory is inefficient, while underallocation may cause failure or degradation of the system. From a security point of view, memory exhaustion can be exploited by denial of service attacks. This applies to programs running on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones as well as to grid computing. Combining amortisation with type theory allows to infer linear bounds on heap consumption of functional programs with explicit memory deallocation [1]. The AHA project aims to adapt this method for non-linear bounds within func