[Cuis] To GC or to Recycle?

[Kirk Fraser]

For completeness another big reason for traffic accidents is socializing.
 One can get so distracted by other people in the car or on cell phones
that they pay too much attention to their social interaction and not enough
to the road resulting in an accident.  That is an illustration of what we
are talking about with Garbage Collection.  We have the dynamic of GC to
clean up after playing to develop something in Smalltalk.  What if instead
we ask the VM builder, Elliot, to add a switch to go from dynamic GC mode
to static or compiled mode where all objects do not get GC'd but recycled?
 So for example, if an application drags lots of data from disk into
memory, the new data objects reuse the same object pointer headers as
before?  In other words, in compiler mode there would be no new objects.

This switch would allow Smalltalkers to play all they want creating new
objects like now but when they want to deploy a time sensitive end user
application like a self-driving car, they flip the switch and the VM treats
the code as another language would treat .exe's.  This could in effect
supply all the advantages Python, Java, and other .exe producing languages
have without a lot of work except one primitive call. Plus the Smalltalk
playground could become available again with another flip of the switch.

Kirk W. Fraser
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