Paging in a Distributed Virtual Memory
Marco T. Morazán, Douglas R. Troeger, Myles Nash · Trends in Functional Programming · 2001
Poor memory performance has been associated with functional languages. The MT System is being developed to study the design choices in the development of an all-software based distributed virtual memory for a pure list-based functional language. Of key importance is to understand the virtual memory behaviour of the different components of a pure functional system. In this paper, we present results obtained from observing the paging behaviour of the MT heap that demonstrate the virtual memory benefits of using the MT allocation algorithm over allocation algorithms that box their data. FIFO performs nearly as well as LRU for list-based memory on a set of benchmarks which include a metacircular evaluator for MT. The empirical results are explained by the paging behaviour of three frequent high-level memory accessing operations.