Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Chris Dollin
Date : Fri Jul 22 2005 12:10 pm

Rob Thorpe wrote:

> Chris Dollin wrote:

>> [Do you happen to have cites for any of Lisp, Smalltalk, Pop11, SML,
>>  or OCaml doing stack-allocation, 'cos I'd like to chase them up.
>>  I'm sure I remember reading stuff about Lisp compilers attempting
>>  it; I'm equally - or more - sure that Pop11 doesn't do it.]
> 
> I'll look it up, and post a reply when I have.

Ta muchly.

I feel a reanimated free-time-burner breathing over my shoulder.

> I've heard similar things.  I read a paper by Zorn long ago that said
> that GC was quicker than malloc/free for some group of programs which
> looked plausible.  But since then relative memory latency has
> increased, making GCs that pass over large amount of memory more
> wasteful of performance, so I doubt it's still true.

That amounts to selection pressure for things like generational
collectors, though, so it might still be true - and the presence
of loadsa memory on typical machines has probably changed the way
store gets manually managed in applications ... so, who knows?

Oh, for world enough and time.

-- 
Chris "clash of cymbals epitaph" Dollin
predicting self-predictors' predictions is predictably unpredictable.

.