Comment by OptionOfT
2 days ago
My favorite story about garbage collection: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...
2 days ago
My favorite story about garbage collection: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...
They do that in other places.
As I heard the tale, on the Standard Missile, they don't recirculate the hydraulic fluid, they just spit out as the missile flies. It's a wonderful engineering solution.
And on the Falcon 9, the hydrocarbon fuel is used as hydraulic fluid, then just dumped back into the fuel tank.
And the SR-71 uses its fuel as coolant.
"There was a lot we couldn't do, but we were the fastest kids on the block..."
I would call that a region-based memory allocator... Only that it has a single region, ever.
Yeah if you have for example a http request, you can just collect garbage you create during that request in a single region, then throw it away when the request has been handled. This is quite standard.
Well, the garbage is collected when the missile hits the target region.
The garbage is spread out over the target region.
Or it's a generational garbage collector with the generation management and collection functionality omitted.
It’s pretty standard in many places I think - the point here is not the null gc but rather exact memory requirements being proved statically.
This is one of my favourite anecodtes to tell peers and colleagues because it's important when understanding buisness case/needs against programming. We all want to make perfect software, but it isn't always neccessary.
now that is what i call the ultimate in garbage collection technology
I think the missile impact creates a lot more garbage spread over a wider area.