Re:Memory Management Reference
by oddity on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @03:12PM
(#32074402)
Depends on how you define innovation.
The hard truth is that there is no free lunch. We like to pretend we're using a Turing machine, but the moment you start caring about performance or memory limits, the abstraction breaks down and you realize that physics dictates that we have a finite state machine instead. This was "solved" about as well as it could be many years ago with however many billions were poured into GC R&D for all the people who don't care deeply about the limits, but nothing is going to magic away that fundamental trade-off unless we discover new physics.
Every innovation since then has been about developing workarounds to deal with that trade-off in more or less sophisticated ways.
The hard truth is that there is no free lunch. We like to pretend we're using a Turing machine, but the moment you start caring about performance or memory limits, the abstraction breaks down and you realize that physics dictates that we have a finite state machine instead. This was "solved" about as well as it could be many years ago with however many billions were poured into GC R&D for all the people who don't care deeply about the limits, but nothing is going to magic away that fundamental trade-off unless we discover new physics.
Every innovation since then has been about developing workarounds to deal with that trade-off in more or less sophisticated ways.