Comment by skavi
3 days ago
seems not as great for consumer software in uncontrolled environments. static allocation means the application hordes memory that the OS should probably be able to provide to other processes. constant work probably leads to higher average power usage.
The OS writes unused memory pages to the swap file, so this is a non-issue. I can go allocate a TB of RAM on my 32gb system and windows will happily give it to me.
> the OS _writes_ unused memory pages to the swap file
The OS write unused memory pages to the swap file by default. But the 'constant memory' design is usually done with locking in memory both the executable and memory pages (also pinning the process to CPUs, using realtime priorities etc).
Windows doesn't support overcommit, so you can't unless you have a ridiculously huge swap set. It is an issue.
In practice, writing programs this way tends to result in programs that use less memory not more.