I met... GCus

The title in this post is pronounced GCus like jesus but with GC. The latter being the abbreviation for Garbage Collection. This post is just to say that I met Richard Jones at PLDI this year (he is the guru of garbage collection) and his work has made up a huge portion of my thesis. He deserves infinite beers. I also chatted a bit with Hans Boehm again. I also met David Gay and Emery Berger, both whom I have cited in my thesis work. It's way cool to see these people, notable names of memory management! Way cool! Oh, and I had Mr. Jones sign a piece of trash for me, effectively he "marked some garbage" ... but since it has been marked, it shouldn't be reclaimed.
-Matt

Non-deterministic Memory Management

So when the implementation mandates that all returned memory should be zero'd... it should be. In other words, if the compiler distributes memory via a routine that does not zero memory a'la malloc(), the compiler should wrap the memory allocator and zero data, or use calloc(). The result can be a non-deterministic executable.

I wonder, since Bell's theorem suggests that even if we account for all the local hidden variables, we still cannot account for the non-determinism seen in quantum mechanics. Therefore, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle seems to say that, yes, despite what makes sense to me, the universe does have non-deterministic properties. So, I suppose we could bubble-this up to the compiler world and memory management (this reduction might be grossly wrong) and suggest that non-determinism really does exist if a memory management routine, such as malloc, can induce non-deterministic behavior in an executable.

-Matt