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From: wyant@saber.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula3
Subject: garbage collection and fast allocation/deallocation
Message-ID: <9106051432.AA22607@riposte>
Date: 5 Jun 91 14:32:15 GMT
Lines: 18
To: m3

This may have been discussed before, so pardon me for raising it
again if it has been.

It has been observed that allowing the user to write specialized
allocators and deallocators for classes of objects that share similiar
lifetimes can improve performance. Mesa and Cedar supported this with the 
notion of 'zones'. Lisp environments have something similiar; and C++ allows one to overloadthe 'new'  and 'free' operators to provide type-specific allocators/deallocators.

I don't see such support in Modula-3. I guess my question to the Modula-3
designers would be: is the trend to move away from such mechanisms and have more intelligent garbage collectors (generational or temporal). Has anyone
found this to be a problem in developing Modula-3 applications. Not having
seen Trestle, how has garbage collection interacted with the need to create
lightweight UI objects fairly rapidly ? Any studies on this ?

Ever curious (in more then one sense :-))

Geoff Wyant
wyant@saber.com