[MUD-Dev] [TECH] memory management system released

[Bruce Mitchener]

The result of about 30 man-years of work on a memory management
system has been released under an open source license:

     http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/
     http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/doc/2002-01-30/ismm2002-paper/

     "The Memory Pool System is a very general, adaptable,
      flexible, reliable, and efficient memory management
      system. It permits the flexible combination of memory
      management techniques, supporting manual and automatic
      memory management, in-line allocation, finalization,
      weakness, and multiple concurrent co-operating
      incremental generational garbage collections. It also
      includes a library of memory pool classes implementing
      specialized memory management policies."

     "Between 1994 and 2001, Harlequin (now part of Global
      Graphics) invested about thirty person-years of effort
      developing the MPS. The system contained many innovative
      techniques and abstractions which were kept secret. In
      1997 Richard Brooksby, the manager and chief architect
      of the project, and Nicholas Barnes, a senior developer,
      left Harlequin to form their own consultancy company,
      Ravenbrook, and in 2001, Ravenbrook acquired the MPS
      technology from Global Graphics. We are happy to announce
      that we are publishing the source code and documentation
      under an open source licence. This paper gives an overview
      of the system."

This is the same library used in the commercial versions of the
Dylan programming language from Harlequin (now from Functional
Objects).

This is probably one of the most exciting things to happen in the
boring world of memory management in a couple of years. :)

I'd like to see some analysis of how this compares with other memory
managers, both for manual management and garbage collection.

  - Bruce



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