Autolang-A C++ VM with 2ms startup time and arena-restart memory model
2ms startup beats Lua, but 2x-5x slower at runtime—unfocused tradeoff.
Arena-based memory model for compiled languages — automatic O(1) heap reclamation at scope exit, no GC, no borrow checker, no manual frees. Allocation routing is resolved at compile time via user-defined lifetime scopes. Includes a C macro shim PoC and benchmarks.
O(1) arena cleanup with handles making dangling pointers unconstructable by default.
Systems programmers, C developers, compiler engineers
Rust arenas · Region-based memory management · C++ memory pools
The safety default: allocating functions return ARENA_PTR handles (packed arena_id + offset integers), not raw pointers. A dangling pointer at a function return boundary is unconstructable by default. Cross-scope lifetime extension is explicit — you enter the target arena via SCOPE(ptr) before allocating, which routes the object into the outer arena without transferring ownership.
Benchmarks (no optimization flags): 1M-node tree cleanup drops from 31ms to 1ms (~30×). There's a real regression in tight inner loops (~0.76×) because DEREF can't hoist the base pointer the way a compiler would — the spec documents this honestly.
This is a C macro-based proof-of-concept for a memory model I'm targeting in a compiled language. The interesting question isn't the C implementation — it's whether scope-structured arena routing is a sound replacement for GC and borrow checking across the class of programs that matter.
Repo: https://github.com/hollow-arena/ariandel — SPEC.md has the full model including concurrency semantics and the comparison to Tofte & Talpin region-based memory.
2ms startup beats Lua, but 2x-5x slower at runtime—unfocused tradeoff.
MCP-native memory beats vendor lock-in, but memory import already exists in Claude.
Finally benchmarks agents on real tasks instead of chat — separate cost and performance rankings.
Path-scoped memory beats project-wide rules files for team context sharing.
PostgreSQL ltree beats graph traversal for hierarchical AI memory with versioning.
Three-layer orphan process cleanup for Claude Code's known memory leak.