[bitc-dev] Pools in lieu of GC

[Sandro Magi]

Section 4.1 of [1]:

  4.1 Generational garbage collection of process-local heaps

  As mentioned above, when a process dies, all its allocated memory area 
can be
  reclaimed directly without the need for garbage collection. This 
property in turn
  encourages the use of processes as a form of programmer-controlled 
regions: a
  computation that requires a lot of auxiliary space can be performed in 
a separate
  process that sends its result as a message to its consumer and then 
dies. In fact, because
  the default runtime system architecture has for many years been the 
process centric
  one, many Erlang applications have been written and  fine-tuned with this
  memory management model in mind.

Sandro

[1] http://user.it.uu.se/~kostis/Papers/scp_mm.pdf

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Sandro Magi <smagi at higherlogics.com> wrote:
>   
>> Aside from type-safe memory systems [1], Erlang is a good example of
>> explicit deallocation despite GC and memory safety. Creating and quickly
>> destroying a separate process is a widely used pattern for prompt
>> reclamation. If there's interest, I can dig up the reference to the
>> Erlang memory management paper where they encouraged this pattern and
>> designed memory management around it.
>>     
>
> I agree that this is an interesting idea. It can be viewed as a
> variant on the explicit named heaps idea.
>
> Yes. I would appreciate a reference.
>
>
> shap
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