MCL Operating System

[Henry Lieberman <lieber@media.mit.edu>]

   Date: 23 Jan 93 04:53 GMT
   From: AMBLE@AppleLink.Apple.COM (Amble, Bob)

   I believe the size of MCL applications being discussed is the disk footprint

But [excluding the CD] MCL comes on fewer floppy disks than Photoshop,
Macromind Director, Pagemaker ... all of which you've got to run in >2
MB partitions for reasonable work anyway.

A real villain is that the Mac OS makes you allocate a fixed-size "partition"
for the application. Application "size" should be dynamically allocated.
This is an obsolete holdover. 

Application-switching is not an issue; the real measure is "working set", 
the relative size of recently and frequently accessed memory. Generational
GC may "move things around" in your address space, but that it irrelevant.
The purpose of GC is not to "reclaim memory" as many think, but to increase
the density of objects that you access in memory.

I was one of the original inventors of generation-based GC. 

Henry Lieberman