Re: Garbage collection for system programming

Some of the replies to the original post seem to be assuming that GC
would have to be used for ALL memory allocation in, say, an operating
system and then proceed to explain why this might be a bad idea. My
guess is that the original poster was thinking along the lines of
using GC to manage the many lists of things (eg, running processes,
events, critical sections, etc.) that make up a typical OS or system
programming task. IMHO, GC might be very good for this sort of
thing. It might not be good to, say, reserve memory space for an
executable to be loaded into. Such large allocations may be made by
the lower-level memory allocator on which the GC is built.


Paul Topping


Design Science, Inc.
"How Science Communicates"
Makers of MathType, WebEQ, MathPlayer, Equation Editor, TeXaide
http://www.dessci.com

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