Support for paging in squeak.

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Feb 7 16:07:29 UTC 2004


Timothy Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
> I've never yet seen a paper that made me think it had made a convincing 
> case for any sort of paging being a benefit to garbage collection. It 
> adds complexity, rarely saves time and often has loopholes. Worse, if 
> the subject OS does paging for virtual memory it's almost certain that 
> it will mess up any attempt at object related paging.

Well, if you want your heap to be your filesystem, then the issue
becomes more interisting!  Paging has to occur somewhere in this case,
if only via the simple mechanism of loading and saving image segments.

Actually, in the short term, loading and saving image segments seems
like a dandy way to experiment with persistent heaps.  There used to
even be a preference that would make projects swap out automatically; I
don't know if that still works or not but it was really neat.


-Lex



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