"Noel J. Bergman" <noel at devtech.com> is widely believed to have written:

> Has anyone done any research into the use of multiple, disjoint, object
> memory heaps in Smalltalk?  I have done several searches via Google, and
> turned up nothing.
Only about twenty years worth. Find some old OOPSLA proceedings, take a
look at 'Garbage Collection' by Jones & Lins, or even my chapter in the
squeak book at  http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/15

VisualWorks uses several spaces (three or six depending on how you
count) and I assume most of the commercial Smalltalks have a similar
setup. IIRC theTektronix system used something like seven generations.
BrouHaHa used a main space and a large-non-pointer space for strings &
bitmaps. ActiveBook Smalltalk (a descendent of BHH) allowed for an
arbitrary number of disjoint spaces and could compact across those sapec
and release empty ones back to the OS. Since we only has 1Mb ram to play
with for Smalltalk, the OS (Helios, a descendent ofTripos) and a fax
filing system, this was quite important. And finally, at least from my
memory, Little Smalltalk could be claimed to have had an object space
for each object since it used malloc() to instantiate everything.

tim 
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- One bit short of a word.