"Norton, Chris" wrote:

Bob Arning [arning@charm.net] is rumored to have written:

"I seem to remember some years ago using Smalltalk VSE on NT. Smalltalk
garbageCollect or its equivalent reported some *really* large number, either
gigabytes or 100's of megabytes (on a machine with 32 meg of real memory).
When something started using too much memory, the closest indication one got
was pronounced sluggishness and, if you listened closely, a disk drive
earning its paycheck."

That is my experience also with VSE (I've been using it for almost 6 years). One thing that VSE does that is really cool is that it returns a walkback quickly (stack overflow) when you have an infinite loop. I don't have the faintest idea how it does this, but I think Squeak could benefit greatly from this. Currently, if you accidentally code an infinite loop (e.g. method A calling method B, which calls method A), Squeak goes off into never-never land for a looooong time. Then it reports low space. If you accidentally abandon or close this walkback, your image gets hosed (well it hangs anyway). I hate it when this happens!

If one of you excellent VM / Interpreter gurus would care to improve this behavior, I'd be very pleased! :-)

I see principal problems here, keyword 'Halteproblem' or how to compute if a program stops. There isn't any general solution... I think, the practical solution to press Alt-. isn't so bad, if you want to interrupt a potentially endless loop. In spite of this the behaviour in the walkback case could probably be improved...

Greetings,

Stephan

Cheers,

---==> Chris