From kragen@dnaco.net Sun Aug 30 16:30:09 1998 Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1998 16:30:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: bkuhn@ebb.org Subject: Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative collector Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1585 Status: O X-Status: What did Chris Toshok say? Here's where it lives, in case you haven't found it already: By the way, there's a huge amount of research that has gone into garbage collection. There are garbage collectors (the Boehm collector is one) which are usually about as fast as explicit allocation and deallocation; there are soft-real-time and hard-real-time garbage collectors; there are distributed garbage collectors; etc. A nice place to start is . Writing code without having to worry about memory management typically reduces development time by 30%-40%, and also allows you to build much more flexible programs and libraries. Often, it even makes it possible to build more efficient programs. It's really just common sense. If you have some task your program has to do, do you (a) scatter code throughout tens of thousands of lines of code to do the task, or (b) centralize the performance of the task in one place? And if, when programming, there's some kind of problem that's easy for a computer to solve reliably, but difficult for a human being to solve reliably, do you (a) do it yourself or (b) write code to do it for you? Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web