[2] [gclist] GC & profiling

[Pekka P. Pirinen]

Dave Berry wrote:
> At 04:13 24/04/2001, Fergus Henderson wrote:
>> But since Harlequin went out of business,
>> I'm not sure what that tells us :-(
> [...]
> By the way, Harlequin is still in business, as two firms.  Harlequin still
> produce their postscript interpreter and related add-ons for the high-end
> printer marker.  Xanalys [eXpert ANALYSts] are still active with Lisp, and
> of course memory management -- your cue, Pekka?

This is indeed what happened: Two years ago, Harlequin had a funding
crisis, and was bought by a larger company, Global Graphics.  The new
owners closed down some product lines, such as MLWorks, and split the
company into two.  The Memory Management Group survived, being
critically important to certain products.  It even prospered,
branching out into consulting, although we lost some good people.

However, just recently, the management decided to shut down the group.
The technology is still critically important to Harlequin's flagship
product, but the company doesn't want to be in the memory management
business.  We're looking for a new home for the MPS toolkit we've
developed (this is a generic toolkit, not the ML collector), since
it'd be a shame to waste it.

I'm not sure what that tells us.  Perhaps that there's isn't a memory
management market, although there are lots of programmers out there
who need the technology (even if they don't always know it)?  Geodesic
seems to have gotten out of the market as well, and into the
reliability one.
-- 
Pekka P. Pirinen
(no longer) Adaptive Memory Management Group, Harlequin Limited