At 11:50 AM 8/20/01 -0400, Mark Lundquist wrote: >In the software industry overall, garbage collection is high on the "must >have" list for an implementation language. . . . . etc., etc., etc. WHEW! That was quite a dissertation! But very well thought out. Just my two cents worth, from the days, MANY years ago, when I did a lot of work with compilers. There really are two issues here: 1. Garbage Collection, meaning to reclaim memory, say in the heap, to make it available for new elements. 2. Memory (Heap) Fragmentation. 1. tends not to be a performance issue, even in most hard real time systems. Compaction algorithms to recover from 2., and when they are executed, are usually the real performance issues. Although I have not looked at a Garbage Collection algorithm (in the larger sense, involving both 1 and 2), for any compiler recently, I'm guessing that part of the problem with contemporary C-class compiler writers is they use simplistic algorithms, and don't particularly care to distinguish between 1 and 2. Does anyone know for sure? sro S. Ron Oliver, semi-retired professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering. www.csc.calpoly.edu/~sroliver caress Corporation is proud to be the U.S. representative for Top Graph'X, developers of high quality software components, using Ada. For more information, check out www.topgraphx.com.