On Wednesday, 2002-09-25 at 10:41:19 -0400, valerian wrote: > BTW, anyone know if Perl 6 will free unused memory? From what I > understand, right now it just allocates as needed, but never gives any > back to the OS when it's done... (ie, when some function ends)
Even if Parrot (the perl 6 engine) free()'s unused memory, all malloc implementations I know will not return memory to the OS. If the implementation uses brk() or sbrk(), it can only grow or shrink the data segment, not deallocate arbitrary parts of it. Only if it mmap()'s from /dev/null it can do that. Add to this mess that free()'d memory tends to be non-contiguous, you have a nice SMOP. Lots of overhead for little gain. Lupe Christoph -- | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.lupe-christoph.de/ | | Big Misunderstandings #6398: The Titanic was not supposed to be | | unsinkable. The designer had a speech impediment. He said: "I have | | thith great unthinkable conthept ..." |
