[Mono-dev] Should we replace MemoryStream?

[Avery Pennarun]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com> wrote:
>    I just blogged about a memory fragmentation issue here:
>
>        http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Nov-09.html
>
>    And I am wondering: since MemoryStream is one of these sources of
> problems, we could replace this implementation with MindTouch's
> ChunkedStream.

Probably stupid question: why is a compacting garbage collector
actually needed?  C programs have survived for a *long* time without
any ability whatsoever to compact memory, simply by carefully
optimizing their allocation algorithms to avoid fragmentation.  Is the
mono allocator very non-optimal in this respect?

Like I said, I feel like this is a stupid question.  But I'm curious
about the answer, and neither your blog post nor the linked page on
the sgen collector addresses it.

Thanks,

Avery