(~gc side-track Walter) Has anyone ever tried using a caching model for application memory? LRU evict memory objects to disk w/ a pseudo persistent memory application behavior?
p.s. those seem to be persistent object focused. Persistence in a caching memory model would be a side-effect (and doesn't even have to be used). Do you know if there exists research primarily focused on 'a caching memory model' as an alternative to (general) GC or reference counting strategies?
The general idea is pretty straight forward, you have a ~fixed size chunk of (virtual) memory that active memory objects reside in. Garbage and very rarely used references get flushed to disk. Presumably, if the operating memory requirements (i.e. active objects) are met by available Ln cache layer, this should be a viable alternative to 'collecting garbage'. We're trading the overhead of tracing/ref-counting with the cost of cache mechanism. If cache is tiered, then the 'garbage' & 'rarely used' objects will end up in nice VM blocks that OS will flush to disk. One approach basically requires the use of one annotation at language level to distinguish 'long lived' objects.