Malloc Alone, a story of the Computer’s Memory

Malloc Alone - Virtual Memory, Garbage Collection, Allocators, Ownership Semantics

This week I did­n’t have the chance to pub­lish anoth­er blog post, because I was busy pre­par­ing an actu­al present­a­tion of the con­tents I’ve been releas­ing recently here. I’m very proud to intro­duce you to this beau­ti­ful piece of edu­ca­tion: Recommended if you’re just start­ing with com­puters and want to learn some import­ant stuff about […]

Resource Management in perspective: the Stack

An archetypical analogy of a stack data structure with a stack of plates.

Up to now, we have been focus­ing on where memory man­age­ment actu­ally occurs, the heap. But this is not the only memory seg­ment rel­ev­ant to a pro­gram. Indeed, in all garbage col­lec­ted tech­niques, there’re oth­er play­ers hav­ing a rel­ev­ant role in the game: the mutat­or and the root set. In the ref­er­ence coun­ted garbage collection, […]

Garbage Collectors in the real world

Well automatically cleaned factory

We saw the essen­tially two only ways to do Garbage Collection, and we saw their naive dis­ad­vant­ages. I say naive, because we saw the very simplist­ic imple­ment­a­tions. Like any­thing else in com­puter sci­ences, Garbage Collectors are an extremely optimised-(able) tool. Lets give it a quick intu­it­ive thought. Tracing under­goes long pause times, mostly because it […]

On Syntax and Semantics, or what Python didn’t get right

C vs Python or how Python really adds nothing revolutionary to the field

Some time ago, per­haps even as far as a year ago, I was just start­ing to watch con­fer­ences and lec­tures in my extens­ively use­ful you­tube account, on top­ics like λ‑Calculus or Category Theory, when on a con­fer­ence by Bartosz Milewski on Categories, he threw a bril­liant sen­tence, that speaks some­thing like this: «Humans should­n’t downgrade […]