>> It would be cool to be able to get a handle on being able to shrink >> the memory occupied by an application dynamically. Malloc (through >> brk()) grows the memory footprint, but free does not shrink it. >> The same is true for the stack. Once allocated, it doesn't get freed >> until the process exits. > > yes it would. does plan 9 have programs that could make use of this > currently?
No, and it would be hard to do it because you'd need ways to compact fragmented memory after a lot of mallocs and frees. And then, you'd need a way to fix the pointers after compacting. Sape