David Thompson

UNIX never changes

David Thompson at

Reading the "UNIX Hater's Handbook", a document from the 1994. Some things never change.

"But why should a network server grow over time? You’ve got to realize that the Sun software dynamically allocates very complex data structures. You are supposed to call “free” on every structure you have allocated, but it’s understandable that a little garbage escapes now and then because of programmer oversight. Or programmer apathy. So eventually the swap volume fills up! This leads me to daydream about a workstation architecture optimized for the creation and manipulation of large, complex, interconnected data structures, and some magic means of freeing storage without programmer intervention. Such a workstation could stay up for days, reclaiming its own garbage, without need for costly booting operations."

It's 2015 and there's still a lot of people that do not see the benefit of garbage collection!

lnxwalt@microca.st, Charles Stanhope, Yutaka Niibe, Kete Foy likes this.