Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/

[Branden]

Ken Fox wrote:
>  2. Work proportional to live data, not total data. This is hard to
>     believe for a C programmer, but good garbage collectors don't have
>     to "free" every allocation -- they just have to preserve the live,
>     or reachable, data. Some researchers have estimated that 90% or
>     more of all allocated data dies (becomes unreachable) before the
>     next collection. A ref count system has to work on every object,
>     but smarter collectors only work on 10% of the objects.

Does this 90/10 ratio mean that the memory usage is actually 10 times it
needs to be? (if it were even _possible_ to pack all the data without
fragmentation problems)

- Branden