Garbage collection

[David Brown]

>>>>> On Thu, 2 Sep 1999 11:25:35 -0500 (CDT), James Hague <jhague@REDACTED> said:

> But the point of Erlang is to not think about low-level efficiency unless
> you really need to, eh? :)

Yeah, it's supposed to be the job of the implementors of the
language.  When we discuss how the garbage collector works, we make
ourselves to be implementors.

I guess some good questions to ask would be, for typical Erlang
programs (whatever typical):

- Is it frequent that processes are created and destroyed, while
  making a bunch of data while alive.
- Are there many longer lived processes that serve up data.

I would also suspect that the whole memory footprint could be reduced
with a single collection heap.  This might help with the desired
implementation that runs on a PDA.

Dave Brown