🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <nevin-2109950243110001@mac-nevin.cs.arizona.edu>, nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU (Nevin ":-]" Liber) writes:

  Nevin> And what happens in low-memory situations due to fragmenting
  Nevin> on those same systems?  The apps just quit, losing all of
  Nevin> your work.  The handle mechanism has nothing to do with CMT
  Nevin> and everything to do with avoiding low memory situations.
  Nevin> There are two ways to do it: Do nothing (the Unix way), and
  Nevin> hope the situation doesn't occur very often, or do some form
  Nevin> of garbage collection.  Apple chose the latter.  Unix
  Nevin> programmers write their apps assuming an indefinite amount of
  Nevin> virtual memory (just ask anyone who tried to port CFront to a
  Nevin> personal computer -- ugh), ...

Not quite true.  UNIX programmers assume malloc/free will do a good
job of reusing memory that has been free()d, so they don't have to
worry about it.  If they neglect to free their memory, they lose - but
so will the Apple programmers - those blocks accesible through handles
have to be kept *somewhere*... ;-)  Perhaps malloc()'s strategies are
not as "compacting" as Apple's - which is where your assumption of
infinite memory does come in ;-) - but it is not so bad as that, in
general...

Moises

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