On 11 Sep 2013, at 05:04, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote: > > On Sep 10, 2013, at 12:33 PM, Dave <d...@looktowindward.com> wrote: > >> You with all this talk of memory management, you'd think that Apple (or >> someone) would have come up with a hardware solution for this by now. In the >> 70's and 80's I worked on some firmware and hardware that would handle >> garbage collection in real time (with a little help from OS Software). > > I’ve read through a lot of GC papers in the past, and I’m not sure what > you’re talking about here, unless it’s something that allows extra tag bits > to be stored in pointers. This was used a lot in old LISP systems; it can be > useful with interpreted languages but I don’t think it’d be applicable to a > C-based language. (A lot of the more sophisticated GC techniques simply don’t > work with C-like code because it’s too low-level and makes too many > assumptions about memory. For example, you can’t use compaction or copying > collectors at all because objects can’t be relocated. The Obj-C garbage > collector had to rely on inefficient conservative mark/sweep algorithms.)
This was using aUnix Box/MS-DOS box and it was our own hardware, and yes it worked with C and Assembler (via a set of Macro's). Basically it was a lump of hardware that controlled allocating memory from a pool. It wasn't used for system memory (although it could have been), but as a way of speeding up certain Image Processing operations. Basically it could allocate or free a memory block in one machine cycle - it could also copy or fill a block much faster then the CPU too. >> If Apple were to implement something like this I think there would be a >> massive increase in performance and reliability > > Nothing personal, but I think you’re falling into the common fallacy of > thinking that Apple engineers are naive and/or ignorant. It happens all the > time on these lists. In general, you should assume that the people working on > system software are pretty damn smart and experienced, and are aware of all > the techniques that an interested but non-expert outsider would know of. If > they’re not using them, there’s probably a good reason for it. I'm sure the engineers are a mixture of good, mediocre, and not so good the same as any where else, why should Apple be different? But engineers don't get much say on what projects/features are implemented (especially somewhere like Apple, MS or any of the big 5 technology companies). > (This is a special case of the nearly universal engineer’s fallacy of > dismissing any problem you haven’t personally worked on as trivial.) I personally worked on these problems and I don't consider the trivial. Cheers Dave _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
