Re: Resource Revocation

[Niklas Höglund]

address@hidden wrote:
> In this particular case, I'm not much worried about limiting the actions
> of the cental pager to "evict" and "discard", as other variants seem
> very unlikely. (Though still I'd prefer keeping the option to do
> self-paging for possible special cases...)

A garbage-collected language may want to run a garbage collection, if
that's not too much work to do here.

I remember compiling the MLton compiler with itself. The documentation
says it can't be done with only 512 MB of RAM (IIRC), and I found that
the random memory-accesses it does during a compile ground the machine
to a complete halt as soon as it paged a fraction of the process out.

I think it may have used copying garbage collection, so it would have
used two spaces during collection, copying all live data from one to the
other before freeing the other.

Anyway, most language runtimes that do gc probably keep large enough
spaces to not have to do gc too frequently, but could probably free up
or shuffle around data easily enough if memory pressure is high.

-- 
Niklas