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From: duggie@Jessica.stanford.edu (Doug Felt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Object Pascal
Summary: objects vs malloc
Keywords: Object Pascal, Object C
Message-ID: <155@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 30 Jan 89 17:51:12 GMT
References: <7096@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <1096@husc6.harvard.edu>
Sender: news@Portia.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: duggie@Jessica.stanford.edu (Doug Felt)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 20

Excuse me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that early
implementations of the standard C libraries used the memory manager
rather naively to implement things like malloc, with the result that
malloc had rather high overhead both in terms of time and space.
Later implementations allocated larger chunks of memory and malloc'ed
out of those, and obtained siginificant speed improvements.

It seems this would be relevant to the development of object-oriented
flavors of C on the Mac, and whether objects should be memory manager
handles or malloc'ed out of larger chunks of memory.  It may be that
message dispatch overhead outweighs the overhead of
GetState/HLock/HUnlock, or that objects are so relatively persistent
that using the memory manager to allocate new objects via NewHandle is
not significant.  Has someone investigated this?

And speaking of method dispatch...

Doug Felt
Courseware Authoring Tools Project
Stanford University