no-administration heap?

[Florian Weimer]

* Colin Walters:

> At least for desktop applications such as Eclipse, what I would like
> is a much more user-friendly system where the application uses as much
> heap as it needs.  From what I can tell, this is how the Boehm
> collector works, which is used by a number of projects like Python,
> Mono, etc.

The Boehm collector does not require a continuous heap segment, unlike
the Hotspot collector (AFAIK).  This makes incremental allocation from
the operating system much easier.  (Same for the Ocaml collector, BTW.)

At least on Linux, the problem is that there is no documented API to
reserve address space (so that no other mappings end up there) without
actually allocating backing store.  MAP_NORESERVE does not work as
documented.