On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Joe English wrote:
> This turns out not to be the case; testing with Hugs
> invariably fails with a "Garbage collection fails to
> reclaim sufficient space" on even moderately sized
> documents (5000 nodes or so).
If I remember correctly, one of the past postings
explained that the current version of Hugs does not
properly handle the tail optimizations. You will
probably get a good explanation of this from someone
else.
The reason I am answering your post is such that
I run into similar problems when executing one
of the examples from Hawk distribution. It deals
with the concrete and symbolic simulation of one
of the intel microprocessors. It supposed to simulate
an evaluation of a sequence of instructions, such
as the implementation of multiplications via additions.
In the concrete case it boils down to evaluation
of "7 * n", in a symbolic case it is "i * n",
where "n" is a running counter. Although it
looks quite simplistic here, the implementation
of those simulations is highly recursive.
Both simulations run fine for small values of
counter "n" but fail badly when "n" becomes big,
40,000 say. I happened to have a presentation
on the subject of Hawk about two months ago, and
the audience was not much impressed when they saw
Hugs failing on such simple (in their view)
examples. I knew beforehand what would happen for
large "n" and I tried to restrict my presentation
to small n's, but unfortunately the audience was
very inquisitive. You see, those people are accustomed
to running their tests for hours a time, so it
was natural for them to ask for some big values
of n.
Not a good publicity for Hugs, unfortunately.
Jan
