[movitz-devel] Lisp OS

[Nikodemus Siivola]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, mikel evins wrote:

> automatically deallocated when they weren't needed anymore. This
> difference in style amounted to an automatic optimization of memory and
> CPU use that gave us a fast, memory-efficient, great-looking graphics

This reminds me of my *hunch* why swapping was (or so I've heard it) never
a problem on Lisp Machines, but tends to be on "modern" platforms:

 Single garbage collector over all processes (can) improves locality of
 reference globally, but even the best per-process allocation schemes are
 doomed to fail when the number of processes grows. Of course, the OS can
 try to deal with this, but that seems to be a lot harder than writing a
 decent GC...

Can anyone debunk/corraborate this?

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus