Comments by "Inconspicuous Chap" (@InconspicuousChap) on "Low Level" channel.

  1. Some of my coursemates were writing garbage collectors as a mandatory thing. Even hopelessly dumb at programming managed to pass that somehow. Comparing that to today's tech screenings... kids asking childish questions pretending to be rocket scientists. Able to use a standard library hash map, what an achievement.
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  2. A good start, why not. Of course your coalescing does not protect from heap fragmentation: suppose the case when the caller frees every second chunk keeping the others for himself. There could be and actually are more complicated scenarios. Whatever you do or do not do, whatever tricky memory guessing strategies you employ, you end up with fragmented unusable heap, so you have to take more memory from the OS (to eventually spoil them too), and you end up with memory leaks. Java fights that using indirect addressing and costly memory degragmentation in GC, which does not fully address the problem, just defers the inevitable program crash and restart. The same thing happens to other resources in one or another form. That's how modern software works.
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  3. The 10-th rule is Greenspun's Tenth Rule I suppose.
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  4. And the most important rule as first thing: #00 Don't use idiots for the job.
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  5. #3 Fully agree. Heap sucks. It's against the math. Lots of efficient algorithms (e.g. Radix Sort) were banned for decades just because of a dynamic storage requirement and reinvented later with fixed memory requirements. Heap memory usage leads to fragmentation and eventually to unavoidable memory leaks even if malloc/free balance is perfectly obeyed. Juniors can rely on a runtime library to do "the magic" that they don't understand, and when it [rather quickly] comes to memory exhausting, they would just recommend to restart it. Responsible programmers whose services' uptime is supposed to be months or years should control that matter.
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  6.  @LuXxenatorX Ok. I'll better shut up indeed. I'm not good at talking to people whose understanding of a problem consists of primitive slogans.
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