Why does the available memory decrease when the Newton is idle?
This kind of memory usage is perfectly normal in a system like Newton that does automatic memory management (also similar to Smalltalk, Lisp, Java). As the event loop runs or even idles, the Newton creates temporary objects. (ala Heisenberg, just observing the state of the Newton in order to update time or amount of heap, uses heap). When this gets to a certain threshhold, the Newton reclaims memory by tracing/discarding items that aren’t being referenced anymore by any other object (aka “garbage collection”). [From a developer’s perspective, not having to worry about allocating and deallocating memory is great, compared to traditional language environments like C; things just eventually disappear if you stop referencing/using them] A real “leak” happens if most of the heap isn’t reclaimed. This could happen if an application hangs onto extra, unnecessary stuff even when closed. And this sometimes can happen also during soup (database) processing when the heap becomes partitioned/frage
