san@cositex.UUCP (Steve Sanderson) (06/12/85)
What are the various opinions on object oriented architectures/ memory
management units? Not being knowledgeable in this area, I would like
to find out more information on the concept(s). For instance in many
Smalltalk-80 systems, it is my understanding that memory is usually
referenced in association with an object, with all of the association
and management of memory being handled by software.
Are there any schemes for hardware to handle this association? Also in
Smalltalk-80, an object is deemed unneeded when the reference count to
an object (much like a link count for a UNIX file) reaches zero? Is
there any nice (whatever that constitutes) hardware implementation to
handle this memory allocation/deallocation?
Dreaming out loud, and with out doing much research, perhaps it would
be nice to have hardware which would understand (in some respect) the
concept of an object, that is; a variable size piece of memory which
can be refered by some simple notation, easy for both hardware and
software to comprehend and manipulate. Lastly, a disclaimer... these
are ramblings, and represent at most a few minutes of thought. Any
thoughts on these, or similar, things would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve Sanderson
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Steve Sanderson, COSI Texas
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