Re: Ammo-zilla

[Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com>]

> I believe this to be a -um- "valid" claim.  According to the reports
> that I have heard, the Java (Sun, which version?) garbage collector
> would collect garbage internally, but would never return the allocated /
> collected space back to the operating system.  This would cause the
> program to develop a very slow "leak".  I don't know how serious this
> ever became (or, actually, even whether this was true) but this was the
> claim.  So, in some sense, it never did collect and free any memory,
> although the program was able to re-use it.

This was true of one Ada RTS five years ago, and a current user 
recently told me it's still true.  The vendor offered us as a "fix" a 
file containing a pragma that made "new" and unch. deall. call malloc 
and free, respectively!  In fact, this vendor's RTS was even worse--free 
list was never defragmented (coalesced, whatever you want to call it) so 
that if your allocations varied in size much, you would eventually have 
NO blocks big enough for another allocation.