[gclist] More questions for the FAQ

[Nick Barnes]

Henry Baker writes:
> [Bob Duff writes: ]
> > John Levine writes:
> > 
> > > Word files are structured as chunks of stuff with pointers, so getting 
> > > rid of the garbage requires in effect a compacting GC.
> > 
> > And Henry says all the garbage goes away on a "save as", but not on a
> > "save".  Yuck!  You're telling me they know how to collect all this
> > garbage, but they don't actually do it on a save?!  It seems like that's
> > the perfect time to invoke the gc.  Are these people trying to sell
> > disks?
> 
> No.  'Save' needs to be very fast, since you want to be able to save
> your work every paragraph or so in case of a computer crash.  The
> right place to do this would be at a Quit/Save, but most programs don't
> couple these the way vi does.

Save needs to be "very fast" in user interface terms. i.e. less than
about half a second. The disk access alone is going to be at least ten
milliseconds. These days, that's hundreds of thousands of processor
cycles. Most Word documents are only a few tens of K. This particular
M$ decision is bad to the point of being farcical.

Nick Barnes