[Haskell-cafe] An interesting paper on VM-friendly GC

[Brandon S Allbery KF8NH]

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On 10/16/10 05:35 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
> GC languages are not exactly rare, so maybe we'll see some OSes start adding
> new system calls to allow the OS to ask the application whether there's any
> memory it can cheaply hand back. We'll see...

I thought Windows already had a system message for something like that.  Or
at least it used to, although I can see why it would have been removed or at
least deprecated.

Unix could do it with a signal, but in general the application can't easily
do that at times chosen by an external entity (consider that the act of
finding such memory could inadvertently *increase* memory pressure on the
system, since an application can't tell which of its pages aren't in core)

The correct solution is to give the application the tools necessary for it
to do its own memory management --- which is what the paper is about.

- -- 
brandon s. allbery     [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]      allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university      KF8NH
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