The LispOS Project: a position paper, part 2

[David Gadbois]

   From: "Dwight Hughes" <dhughes@intellinet.com>
   Cc: "Scott L. Burson" <gyro@zeta-soft.com>, <LispOS@math.gatech.edu>

   You could, for example, have the GC follow pointers within memory
   until reaching one that faults, then add the pointer to a "to do"
   list to tend to later. There would be limitations of course -
   programs/processes that spew a lot of small short to medium life
   objects would seem to benefit the most from this approach. You
   would probably not want to run this way *all* the time (or at least
   be able to adjust the GC's swapping-phobia level).

The system should always be phobic about swapping.  Consider a
mythical disk that can deliver a page in five milliseconds to a
non-mythical 200 MHz processor.  Avoiding said page fault saves you a
million cycles.  You can do a lot of work in a million cycles.

--David Gadbois