[#14696] Inconsistency in rescuability of "return" — Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>

Why can you not rescue return, break, etc when they are within

21 messages 2008/01/02
[#14699] Re: Inconsistency in rescuability of "return" — Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...> 2008/01/02

[#14738] Enumerable#zip Needs Love — James Gray <james@...>

The community has been building a Ruby 1.9 compatibility tip list on

15 messages 2008/01/03
[#14755] Re: Enumerable#zip Needs Love — Martin Duerst <duerst@...> 2008/01/04

Hello James,

[#14772] Manual Memory Management — Pramukta Kumar <prak@...>

I was thinking it would be nice to be able to free large objects at

36 messages 2008/01/04
[#14788] Re: Manual Memory Management — Marcin Raczkowski <mailing.mr@...> 2008/01/05

I would only like to add that RMgick for example provides free method to

[#14824] Re: Manual Memory Management — MenTaLguY <mental@...> 2008/01/07

On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 15:49:30 +0900, Marcin Raczkowski <mailing.mr@gmail.com> wrote:

[#14825] Re: Manual Memory Management — "Evan Weaver" <evan@...> 2008/01/07

Python supports 'del reference', which decrements the reference

[#14838] Re: Manual Memory Management — Marcin Raczkowski <mailing.mr@...> 2008/01/08

Evan Weaver wrote:

[#14911] Draft of some pages about encoding in Ruby 1.9 — Dave Thomas <dave@...>

Folks:

24 messages 2008/01/10

[#14976] nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — David Flanagan <david@...>

The following just appeared in the ChangeLog

37 messages 2008/01/11
[#14977] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...> 2008/01/11

Hi,

[#14978] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — Dave Thomas <dave@...> 2008/01/11

[#14979] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — David Flanagan <david@...> 2008/01/11

Dave Thomas wrote:

[#14993] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — Dave Thomas <dave@...> 2008/01/11

[#14980] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...> 2008/01/11

[#14981] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...> 2008/01/11

Hi,

[#14995] Re: nil encoding as synonym for binary encoding — David Flanagan <david@...> 2008/01/11

Yukihiro Matsumoto writes:

[#15050] how to "borrow" the RDoc::RubyParser and HTMLGenerator — Phlip <phlip2005@...>

Core Rubies:

17 messages 2008/01/13
[#15060] Re: how to "borrow" the RDoc::RubyParser and HTMLGenerator — Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net> 2008/01/14

On Jan 13, 2008, at 08:54 AM, Phlip wrote:

[#15062] Re: how to "borrow" the RDoc::RubyParser and HTMLGenerator — Phlip <phlip2005@...> 2008/01/14

Eric Hodel wrote:

[#15073] Re: how to "borrow" the RDoc::RubyParser and HTMLGenerator — Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net> 2008/01/14

On Jan 13, 2008, at 20:35 PM, Phlip wrote:

[#15185] Friendlier methods to compare two Time objects — "Jim Cropcho" <jim.cropcho@...>

Hello,

10 messages 2008/01/22

[#15194] Can large scale projects be successful implemented around a dynamic programming language? — Jordi <mumismo@...>

A good article I have found (may have been linked by slashdot, don't know)

8 messages 2008/01/24

[#15248] Symbol#empty? ? — "David A. Black" <dblack@...>

Hi --

24 messages 2008/01/28
[#15250] Re: Symbol#empty? ? — Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...> 2008/01/28

Hi,

Re: Manual Memory Management

From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-01-05 00:43:10 UTC
List: ruby-core #14780
Gary Wright wrote:
> There is another hurdle to overcome.  While malloc() will
> request extra memory from the operating system as needed, in
> most implementations it will *never* return the favor and
> return unused memory back to the operating system.
> 
> So even if the garbage collector is 100% efficient, you'll
> be left will a chunk of memory that is free (as in can be
> used for new objects) but that the operating system still
> considers to be 'in use'.  The memory won't be returned to
> the OS until the process exits.

This same problem plagues almost all JVM implementations, which has led 
to many cries that "Java uses too much memory". Java under most 
circumstances uses more memory--but not vastly more--than a comparably 
complex application in any other language. However because of GC, the 
amount of system memory occupied by a Java process is always larger than 
the amount of memory actually needed, because having the heap be exactly 
the correct size would mean spending most time garbage collecting.

That all wouldn't be so bad if memory could be returned to the system, 
but that's vastly complicated by a desire to have GC always run in 
parallel...moving everything in memory to a more compact memory location 
would require stopping the world. So if you have an application that 
allocates a ton of objects and uses a lot of memory briefly on startup 
(as many apps do when initializing) you get a giant memory footprint 
forever.

There's growing interest in solving this for the JVM, and the advocates 
seem to be gaining traction.

- Charlie

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