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Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 14:31:00 +0100 (MET)
From: Damien Doligez <Damien.Doligez@inria.fr>
Message-Id: <200102011331.OAA0000032678@beaune.inria.fr>
To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: sondage / opinon poll
Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr

Hello,

I'm thinking of making a small change to the Gc module in the standard
library in order to get rid of the overflow problems with the
allocation counters.

In the current version of O'Caml, the GC returns its statistics as
values of type int, but some of these values can easily go over 1G,
leading to overflow and useless statistics (except on 64-bit machines).

The plan is to change these values to float, affording 53 bits of
precision instead of the current 31 (or 63 on 64-bit machines).  The
values affected would be:
- the fields minor_words, promoted_words, major_words in the stat record,
- all three fields of the result of the counters function,
- the result type of allocated_bytes.

Now the question is, do we just change these, or do we need to keep
the current version of the functions for backward compatibility, and
add new functions with the new types ?


If you use these functions, please drop me a note saying whether you
would be greatly inconvenienced by an incompatible change in their
types.

-- Damien