langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-11-26

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Dienstag, 26. November 2002

[create SomaFM] is back on track!

somafm.com

Und — hoch erfreulich — auch E7L3 ist wieder in Betrieb.

2002-11-26-veryGoodDay

"RDF-RPV is clear and simple, easy to write and read; more importantly, it makes the triples plainly visible. The murkiness of the triples is one complaint people often make about RDF-XML." — RDF gone sane?

2002-11-26-rpv

The Memory Pool System: Thirty person-years of memory management development goes Open Source

2002-11-26-mm

David Ness 8033 days AGO
I find the MPS article unconvincing. Perhaps it is because I don't understand the problem domain. But maybe I can make my concern clear in the hope that someone will be able to point me in the direction of better understanding it.

First, any piece that keeps talking about `thirty-person years' makes me suspicious. As a `consumer' I care little how much energy went into something. I'd much rather have an idea so great that it took the implementor only 5 minutes once he/she saw it rather than an idea so questionnable that you could pour 30 years of effort into it and still have as little to show as appears in this paper.

Second, I can't find any very clear statement in the paper of what `problem' these elaborate techniques actually `solve'. Even more important, I don't get a clue if the collapse in memory prices impacts the value of this kind of solution in any way (for example, if we have huge amounts of memory available, do crude and obvious techniques obviate the need for the kind of measures discussed in the paper)?

I'd be interested if someone can clue me in on the possible value of any of this.

chris 8031 days AGO
The problem those techniques (and this library, in specific) seem to solve (or at least attempt to alleviate) is that of (C ;-) programmers being notoriously unable to manage memory perfectly (or even well enough).

The most profound development impacting this problem in the recent years probably aren't memory prices, tho (now we want our machines to run for weeks without reboots, therefore programs shouldn't leak, even if we have plenty of RAM - although application-isolating operating systems are the norm much rather than the exception nowadays, and quite fortunately so), but the integration of automatic memory management into all kinds of high-level languages.

If for nothing else, the publication is of great historical interest.

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