🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Nov12.194544.14504@Think.COM> barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
> The 80x86 is not the only architecture with multi-level memory.  There have
> been quite a few systems built with segmented or object-based memory
> architectures.

Well, yes, but the 80x86 is the only survivor with a large enough following
to make it worth while.

[re: the lisp machine]
> Or the C runtime could allocate a big array at program startup time, and do
> all its allocation out of that (growing it when necessary).

This is what the Burroughs C compiler had to do.

Perhaps (here's a heretical thought) it's not worth implementing a C compiler
on some machines.

> You keep on talking about implementing a portable memory allocator in C.

Well, Jim Giles does. I'm not sure why, but I see no great difficulty in
doing it of you're willing to make the effort to carry a tag around. Not as
fast as machine-dependent code, but isn't that always the case?

In any case...

Would it have been such a bad thing to standardise a method of determining
if two pointers pointed into the same object?

They did it for offsets in structures with OFFSET_OF.
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
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peter@ferranti.com