On Fri, 25 May 2001 23:56:04 -0400, "Noel J. Bergman" <noel at devtech.com>
wrote:

> In any case, I really should have been much more clear.  I know how various
> garbage collection schemes work, and I am not referring to the internal
> segmentation of the heap by Smalltalk, generational garbage collection, etc.
> I started by referring to the fact that Squeak uses a single contiguous heap
> allocation, which it subdivides for its own purposes, and there is code that
> relies upon the fact that this memory is contiguous.

VisualWorks 5i uses disjoint memory spaces for OldSpace allocation -- it
allocates (and returns) chuhks of memory from the OS as it needs them.

For instance, the server application I'm working on starts at about 20 MB,
and grows the image in memory dynamically up to about 2 GB, in 25 MB
chunks. VW also has the ability to release memory by removing an empty
OldSpace segment.

As an aside, I'm very impressed that VW can handle what we're throwing at
it without puking all over the place. Smalltalk rocks :-)

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com