[gclist] Ravenbrook open-sources the Memory Pool System Kit

[Nick Barnes]

I am pleased to announce that Ravenbrook Limited has released the
Memory Pool System Kit under an open source license.  The current
public release is 1.100.1, available from
<http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/release/1.100.1/>.

The Memory Pool System (MPS) is a very general, adaptable, flexible,
reliable, and efficient memory management system.  It permits the
flexible combination of memory management techniques, supporting
manual and automatic memory management, in-line allocation,
finalization, weakness, and multiple concurrent co-operating
incremental generational garbage collections.  It also includes a
library of memory pool classes implementing specialized memory
management policies.  It is suitable for use in language runtimes,
virtual machines, and applications.  It is designed from the ground up
to be portable to almost any platform and adaptable to almost any
client requirement.

For a more detailed overview of the MPS, see "The Memory Pool System:
Thirty person-years of memory management development goes Open Source"
<http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/doc/2002-01-30/ismm2002-paper/>.

The Kit includes sources, a test suite, a partial reference manual and
a number of design documents.  We have only been able to include a few
dozen key documents in the current release.  We are working on
converting additional MPS documents, especially more design and
analysis, for inclusion in future releases.  There are a great number
of such documents.

This release is under an open source license.  The license is intended
to make it possible for you to use the MPS in your own projects,
provided that any distribution of the resulting software is open
source.  If you are developing a closed source product and want to use
the MPS you must license under commercial terms from Ravenbrook
Limited.  Please write to us <mps-questions@ravenbrook.com> for more
information.

Ravenbrook <http://www.ravenbrook.com/> is a software engineering
consultancy founded in 1997 by Richard Brooksby and Nicholas Barnes,
previously members of the memory management group at Harlequin, where
the MPS was originally developed.  Richard Brooksby is the original
architect of the MPS.

Nick Barnes
Director
Ravenbrook Limited