Re: newbie Q: storage management

["John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com>]

Jon S Anthony wrote:
> 
> One obvious way out of this for Ada is the generalized
> version of what Robert called out as a "compromise": a subsystem of
> generics which offered several variants.  A single global GC handling
> all dynamic memory issues isn't really needed.  In fact, this is an
> area where Ada could do something a little different by offering the
> ability to have multiple collectors per application targetting the
> specific needs of specific types (or classes of types).  This is the
> sort of thing that I've been working on.

I'm very keen to see how true GC (not conservative GC) could be
shoehorned into Ada95 (other than by compiling to the Java virtual
machine).  One difficulty I'm having is seeing how Storage_Pools would
actually help.  It seems to me that, before you can collect the dead
objects in a given pool, you have to be able to locate and identify
every access value that currently points into that pool.  This might be
feasible, for instance, if access types behaved as if they were derived
from Controlled. But all that System.Storage_Pools seems to provide is a
way to define _how_ the designated objects are allocated and deallocated
-- but not _when_.

Looking forward to being edified... :-)

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