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

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