wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (07/06/90)
> Furthermore, I would like to support the inclusion of Collect > into the memory allocation extension wordset. I presume that COLLECT would perform some sort of garbage collection? If so, I'm not sure that it is applicable. The memory allocation wordset provides a rather primitive mechanism for acquiring memory from the host operating system, rather than a dynamically-relocatable heap. Thus it is not possible to rearrrange such memory "on the fly". Furthermore, the wordset places no restrictions on what the application does with the addresses (i.e. they are not constrained to be left on the stack, or to be stored in variables in any particular way), so it is not in general possible for the system to determine whether or not the application still has a reference to any particular piece of allocated memory. Garbage collection could be provided as part of a more sophisticated memory allocation scheme that could be built on top of the primitive interface. Mitch