[mercury-users] Native garbage collector for Mercury

[Ralph Becket]

Peter Ludemann wrote on 13 Sep:
> 
> It is also *not* true, as somebody earlier claimed, that a lot of O/S
> code is low-level and needs to be very fast.  I would estimate that
> less than 1% of an operating system needs to be super-fast; perhaps
> 10% needs to be fast; and the rest could probably be done with
> interpreted languages (BTW, Cygnus has just announced a front-end to
> gcc for Java).

Just to clarify, I was talking about data-path intensive code such as
device drivers, the scheduler, IPC mechanisms, the X server etc.
Admittedly these constitute about 1% of any real OS, but they are a
very important 1%!  Control path services can (and probably should) be
written in something more likely to produce correct programs rather
than blazingly fast ones.  Trouble is that very few OS's separate the
data path and the control path...

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Becket  |  rwab1 at cam.sri.com  |  http://www.cam.sri.com/people/becket.html