Mac OS Memory Management

Mac OS Memory Management

Historically, the Mac OS used a form of memory management that has fallen out of favour in modern systems. Criticism of this approach was one of the key areas addressed by the change to OS X.

The original problem for the engineers of the Macintosh was how to make optimum use of the 128 KB of RAM that the machine was equipped with. Since at that time the machine could only run one application program at a time, and there was no fixed secondary storage, the engineers implemented a simple scheme which worked well with those particular constraints. However, that design choice did not scale well with the development of the machine, creating various difficulties for both programmers and users.

Read more about Mac OS Memory Management:  Fragmentation, Memory Leaks and Stale References, Switcher, 32-bit Clean, Object Orientation

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