[Rochus]

Common Lisp: It is permissible for an implementation to simply ignore such declarations. And you still have to copy.

Ref counting: only makes sense in a few special cases.

Avoiding dynamic memory management: have a look at mmap.

[aidenn0]

C++: It is permissible for an implementation to allocate every local variable on the heap.

Going back to my original point, you are suggesting a complete rearchitecture of their allocation system. That does not require switching languages to C++. If we are talking about working with 100s of GB of data, that's probably even the correct approach!

TFA does not, however, claim that they have a working set of 100s of GB of data. The data is 100s of GB at rest, but can be processed in chunks with a single pass. That, by itself, does not scream "mmap" to me. On top of that, the data is compressed at rest, so copying is inevitable.

[Rochus]

So we are glad that we can use the data of the memory mapped file directly and do not have to allocate or copy anything. But of course you may solve the problem badly if you prefer so; after all, there are even "scientific" publications that do it that way, as the example shows.

[kazinator]

It's permissible for a C compiler to emit shell scripts.