Re: garbage collection thoughts... again?!

[Steve Dekorte <steve@...>]

On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 12:39 PM, James McCartney wrote:
> I've often wondered if it were possible to design a memory such that 
> pointers are not a number but an open circuit. Close the circuit and 
> the power to the objects' "live" bits turns off and they cease to 
> exist. More of a metaphor than something that could be implemented 
> directly. But some way of using hardware circuits to do your pointer 
> tracing at the speed of light.

When logic and memory inevitably become merged in future computer 
architectures, I suspect something like this will be done. The machine 
could send a "mark" message to it's root node periodically. Each node 
would forward the mark message to those it referenced. A node that 
hasn't received a mark message in a given time period could safely 
assume itself garbage and power down and wait for a allocation message 
for it's type.

Cheers,
Steve
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