[gclist] Name that hypothesis

[David Ungar]

Curve shmurve!

(Haven't been following this--but I just couldn't resist! ;-)

At 5:30 PM -0800 12/4/96, Henry G. Baker wrote:
>> Perhaps something like "the probability an object will die is inversely
>> proportional to its age".  This still leaves "age" undefined, but I
>> think its easier to pin a meaning on it than "young" and "old" as
>> classifications.
>>
>> It's then up to the implementor to define/measure the "death probability
>> curve" for a given application and see if it has properties an allocator
>> can take advantage of (as Henry pointed out, its only when this curve
>> has discontinuities that a generational GC helps).
>>
>> 	J
>
>I didn't mean to imply that the curve had to have discontinuities, but
>that it had to have a different shape/slope in some places than the
>curve for the 'null hypothesis'.  A clever algorithm should then be able
>to tune itself to whatever differences exist between the two curves, just
>like a clever compression algorithm can take advantage of whatever
>redundancies that exist in the input data.
>
>--
>Henry Baker
>www/ftp directory:
>ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html