[plt-scheme] Memory, memory...

At Fri, 17 Jan 2003 14:53:57 +0100, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> It seems that the improvement
> of the memory administration between 0.59 and 1.3 is gone now...

The v200 series does indeed use roughly twice the memory of the v100
series. That doubling holds at all levels: MzScheme, MrEd, and
DrScheme.

It's not due to some new memory-management problem. It's that the
software keeps growing with new features. Supporting an expressive
macro system costs memory. Supporting reliable non-blocking output
operations requires memory. Organizing code intro modules and building
improved constructs in layers costs memory. A more sophisticated class
system costs memory. Doubling the number of teaching languages costs
memory. And so on.

I think PLT Scheme is growing at a rate comparable to most any serious
OS (e.g., Windows, Mac OS X, Linux). Although we put some effort into
bloat control, it's not our research focus, so we don't expect to do
better than other software.

> Python with wx, with Tkinter, with Numeric, PIL, etc.
> doesn't go above 15M.

Perhaps one day those tools will evolve toward something approaching
DrScheme's power. :)

Besides, it sounds like those things are more appropriate to compare to
plain MrEd, which uses 1/2 to 1/3 of the space of DrScheme.

Matthew