Project Snowflake was a multi-year project to bring more manual memory management to .NET without compromising memory safety. The aim was to address the weaknesses of garbage collection for scenarios where the lifetime is well-known. In this talk, I will present several of the designs we attempted as the project evolved. I will discuss the challenges we faced from attempting to get this into the .NET product, and what we learnt from the project.

Matthew Parkinson is a Researcher in the Confidential Computing group at Microsoft Research. His research focusses on memory safety from verification through to language and runtime design. Before joining Microsoft, he was a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.