Re: Memory Management Algorithms for Hard Realtime

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Joe Gwinn wrote:
> In article <dewar.887767452@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
> > The book you talk about is, if we believe its title, about *automatic*
> > memory management. 
> > 
> > There are many algorithms for allocating variable sized blocks with
> > *manual* allocation/release control that have well defined worst
> > case behavior.
> 
> I wasn't planning to come along in a missile running the memory management
> system, so automatic seems best.  What am I missing?

Automatic memory management = garbage collection, i.e., all freeing
operations are done by *implicitly* by the runtime, so there are no
explicit calls to free/Unchecked_Deallocation. Read the book, and this
will become clear.

Manual memory management is where you the programmer must explicitly
invoke some freeing operation to return memory that you've allocated.
It doesn't mean that you interactively free memory from a running program,
as you seem to suggest. Its what you're doing now, if you are using fixed 
size block allocators.

-- Brian