Pat Caudill 1945-2001

Allen Wirfs-Brock Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com
Thu Jun 21 06:46:08 UTC 2001


It is with deepest sorrow that we inform you of the passing of Pat Caudill.
Pat died quietly in his sleep of natural causes on the evening of June 14.

Pat was a key contributor to the development of Smalltalk virtual machine
technology. From 1983-1988 he helped create the Tektronix Smalltalk virtual
machines. These were the first commercially available, high performance
Smalltalk-80 implementations. After leaving Tektronix, Pat joined the
original Instantions, which ultimately became part of Digitalk.  At
Digitalk, he made many contributions to the virtual machines in various
versions of Smalltalk/V and VSE.
While Pat was a uniquely talented implementor of programming languages his
greatest contributions were probably in the area of garbage collection. At
Tektronix he implemented what was probably the first multi-generational
garbage collector to be used in a commercial software product. The Tektronix
collector implemented a number of innovations such as the use of a separate
large object space to minimize copying overhead. Pat continued to develop
garbage collector technology during the rest of his career. Most recently,
Pat developed for Instantiations' JOVE Java compiler an innovative garbage
collector that utilized thread local heaps to maximize GC concurrency.

When Pat wasn't collecting garbage he was an avid skier and ski instructor.
He also loved hiking the tails of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.

Pat's friends and colleagues will be getting together along with some of
Pat's favorite microbrews Saturday, June 23. Any of Pat's friends in the
area who would like the details of this gathering should email
pat.caudill.wake at instantiations.com as soon as possible.








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