VisualWorks Memory Management Tutorial

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Smalltalk Solutions 2001 VisualWorks Memory Management Tutorial. slide 1. VisualWorks Memory Management. Eliot Miranda. VisualWorks technical lead …

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Smalltalk Solutions 2001 VisualWorks Memory Management Tutorial slide 1
VisualWorks Memory Management
Eliot Miranda
VisualWorks technical lead
Cincom Systems, Inc
eliot@parcplace.com
Smalltalk Solutions 2001 VisualWorks Memory Management Tutorial slide 2
About Me
?Started Smalltalk in a summer job in 1983
?Wrote the BrouHaHa series of Smalltalk-80 VMs
- poor claim to GC expertise; BrouHaHa uses ref counting
?Joined ParcPlace in 1995
- technical lead from 3.0 onwards
- THAPI and 3.0 Parcels
- 5i VM - re-implementation of stack-context mapping
- 5i.3 VM - polymorphic inline cache2
Smalltalk Solutions 2001 VisualWorks Memory Management Tutorial slide 3
What’s My Motivation?
?can make the difference between applications crawling or flying
?always left until last
- difficult to read ObjectMemory comment and ObjectMemory class
documentation with sweat in your eyes
?amongst the more esoteric and complex parts of the system
- supposed to be invisible
- much of it is beneath the line
?Warning: Objects not as real as they appear!
- peels back the nice abstractions of objects and reveals the pragmatics of
actual machines
Smalltalk Solutions 2001 VisualWorks Memory Management Tutorial slide 4
Caveats
?this tutorial is about 5i
?most - but not all - applies equally to 3.x (details available)
?specific sizes are from 5i.3…