Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Jon Harrop
Date : Mon Jul 25 2005 12:25 pm

Rob Thorpe wrote:
> That's rather odd, did the system you were programming on have a
> particularly small stack?

No, it was ordinary x86 Linux.

> Or did the C code allocate lots of unnecessary information on the stack?

In a sense, yes. Although it isn't easy to stop it from doing so.

> Was it just the lack of GC acting on the stack?

I would say that this isn't directly related to GC. The C equivalent of the
OCaml was using malloc and free to allocate local variables on the heap.

> Most of the time you can put a similar amount of data in either the
> stack or heap.

In theory, yes. In practice, it can be very fiddly and error-prone in non-GC
languages like C.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com

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