Article 37516 of comp.sys.newton.misc:
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From: sanj@athena.mit.edu (Sanjay S Vakil)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.newton.misc,comp.sys.newton.programmer
Subject: Heap in Newton Devices
Date: 21 Mar 1997 21:10:58 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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With all the complaining about the MP2000 and heap issues, I thought
I'd throw a little developer spin into the mix.

Len Lutz mentioned that he isn't going to buy an MP2000 because it
won't hold the all of the apps on the gargantuan card he wants to
stick into it.  With all due respect, I think that the fault for
this is often with developers rather than with Apple.

I have not (with the exceptions listed below) seen any reason for 
an application to take up any heap when it is not running.

Exceptions:

1.  Remove and install scripts (nothing you can really do about this)
2.  Small amount of heap necessary for newton to reference the package
    (usually <.5k).

Games that people create with ZStuff for YAZI take up about 500 bytes
of heap, entirely due to the exceptions listed above, and I feel back
about that.  Given that, filling up a 20M card with dozen of apps should
only take a small fraction of heap.  Lets say you *every* infocom game
(40?) on a card, taking up some 6M -- you should only use 20k of heap!

In my opinion, there is *no* excuse for a developer to hang on to 
heap space on a device when their application is not running: stick 
stuff into soups where it won't matter, nil and removeslot() stuff when 
you are done with it, and in quitScripts.

It is easy enough to determine if a particular app is wasting heap
while closed:  freeze it, check your heap, then thaw it, run it and 
check again.  If you want to be exact, you can do soft resets after
freezing and after thawing.  Find stuff that is wasting space, and ask 
developers to fix it.  I know that many people work very hard to
make programs that are heap conscious and fast, and want to know
when they have failed.

sanj