GNU Emacs, memory usage, releasing

[Tom Horsley]

>6) Having a linked list of lines is a fairly cheap technology, and inasmush
>it can make the working set smaller (no need to move the gap) it will
>often actually *save* memory, even if it has an overhead for the links (often
>smaller however for small files than the cost of keeping a gap).

I don't want to start any arguments about the merits of one buffer data
structure over the other, but before anyone wastes a lot of time making
a change like this under the assumption that gnuemacs is a nice modular
system with good data hiding principles applied, etc. They should take
a look at the regular expression pattern matching code (just to mention
one example that would disintegrate). It expects the data for the buffer
to be in 1 or 2 chunks. Only RMS knows how deeply intwined this data
structure is in other parts of gnuemacs, but it is not something to
change in one afternoon.

Actually, my biggest objection to emacs is garbage collection. I would
do anything (short of actually doing the work to implement it :-) to
have an incremental garbage collector. There is nothing more disruptive
to your train of thought than being in the middle of coding some algorithm
you have finally gotten your brain to understand, then having everything
stop while the Garbage collecting... message comes up.
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