Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ogicse!oregon!jmeissen
From: jmeissen@oregon.oacis.org ( Staff OACIS)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Memory Protection!
Message-ID: <588@oregon.oacis.org>
Date: 22 Aug 90 16:13:37 GMT
References: <1145.26bd4989@waikato.ac.nz> <1410050@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM>
Organization: Oregon Advanced Computing Institute (OACIS), Beaverton, OR
Lines: 29

In article <1410050@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM> charles@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM (Charles Brown) writes:
>
>In Unix it is slower because the system can release all that memory
>much faster than you can.  Thats because it releases all of it at once
>rather than releasing each separately malloc'ed portion.
>         :
>The only reason I was concerned about this is because on the Amiga you
>*must* deallocate all that RAM because the system does not implement
>resource tracking.  I mentioned to him that I intended to do this in
>all my code.  He told me it was a bad idea for code which would be
>used on Unix.

This is a ridiculous statement. It is never a bad idea for a program to
track its own memory usage. I little extra work, perhaps. Given the speed
of modern day Unix systems, a few extra milliseconds overhead to explicitly
free memory when the program exits is not going to be significant, or even
noticable.

The other side of this is that a program that is written efficiently for
the Amiga is generally never going to run on a Unix machine. There is a 
very restricted class of software (strictly file I/O, command-line based,
no user interaction) that, when done right, looks the same on both 
machines. And even then, it's usually possible to take advantage of 
Amiga-specific features to make it smaller and faster.
-- 
John Meissen .............................. Oregon Advanced Computing Institute
jmeissen@oacis.org        (Internet) | "That's the remarkable thing about life;
..!sequent!oacis!jmeissen (UUCP)     |  things are never so bad that they can't
jmeissen                  (BIX)      |  get worse." - Calvin & Hobbes