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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Garbage Collection and Aging
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In article <01bbcb45$d2b24120$c9d63d9d@wsmith>, "Walter Smith"
<wrs@pobox.com> wrote:

> Paul Wilson <wilson@cs.utexas.edu> wrote:
> > Tom Lord <lord@emf.emf.net> wrote:
> > >Too bad computer memories don't generally use
> > >adaptive compression for this kind of situation.
> > 
> > Isn't it?  :-)  (*Some* computer memories do this;  looked inside the 
> > Newton lately?  It's got our heap data compression algorithm in it.)
> 
> Oops, actually, Newton doesn't compress the heap at runtime. Newton
> packages (applications) are essentially frozen heaps, and those can be
> compressed with your algorithm, but they're read-only.
> 
> However, you can set up a virtual binary object (kind of like a
> memory-mapped file) for working space, and it will be pagewise compressed
> into the object store (RAM or Flash) when the system needs free pages.
> That's pretty close. We got (they probably still get) a lot of requests to
> extend that mechanism to objects with pointers in them, which is feasible,
> and that would be even closer.
> -- 
> Walter Smith    wrs@pobox.com    http://www.pobox.com/~wrs/
> This posting consists of my personal opinions, of course.

RamDoubler, of course, does do heap compression.
