The managed resource API [LWN.net]

The managed resource API

Posted Feb 25, 2007 12:13 UTC (Sun) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458)
In reply to: The managed resource API by flewellyn
Parent article: The managed resource API

I disagree. A garbage collector is a 'Fire and forget' memory allocation strategy. What is described here is a memory allocator that groups together allocations so that you can tell the system "when this piece of memory here is recycled, then these pieces over here are no longer needed either". That is sometimes exteremely useful, since it turns out that allocation time is often a time when you have pretty detailed knowledge of when something will die.

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The managed resource API

Posted Mar 1, 2007 8:44 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

A garbage collector is a 'Fire and forget' memory allocation strategy. What is described here is a memory allocator that groups together allocations so that you can tell the system "when this piece of memory here is recycled, then these pieces over here are no longer needed either".

That shows a poor understanding of garbage collectors. In fact a GC has precisely this information - that groups of memory are related and that when one piece of memory is no longer reachable, that causes other memory allocations to be unreachable too. This is encoded implicitly in the relationship of pointers between memory areas. All that is happening here is that the kernel devs have made this relationship explicit, inefficiently.

Rich.