Mmemory management and garbage collectors (was: Re: Using Hurd features

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:24:35 -0400,
"Jonathan S. Shapiro" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 18:29 +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > <address@hidden> writes:
> > Guile for instance could certainly make good use of
> > libhurd-mm's hooks, things of that sort...
> 
> If you are thinking about using memory management in support of garbage
> collection, forget it. The literature on this is pretty comprehensive
> and mostly negative.

This is interesting.  We have always used three example applications
for the need to increase quality of service by providing more control
over physical resource usage:

1. Databases
   Stonebraker "Operating System Support for Database Management"
   
2. Garbage Collectors
   (eg A.W. Appel and K. Li.  Virtual Memory Primitives for User Programs.)

3. Continuous Media applications
   (eg G.E. Mapp An Object-Oriented Approach to Virtual Memory Management)

These are the three examples given in Steven Hand: "Self-Paging in the
Nemesis Operating System".  Maybe the result in 2. is not universal.
Even if not, this would still leave the first and third applications
as important fields to explore.

Anyway, we would be interested in some references about the negative
results for garbage collectors.

Thanks,
Marcus