Re: newbie Q: storage management

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <33720AA5.2E59@sprintmail.com> "John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com> writes:

> > 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).

Well, if you have compiler support this really should not be that much
of an issue.  Conservative collectors really live in a "hostile" world
where there is no compiler support and not much other information
either (no type information, for example).


> One difficulty I'm having is seeing how Storage_Pools would
> actually help.

Well, they help a bit in the internals and in allowing constraints to
be put on their access values.


> 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.

Yup - you certainly do.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com