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Agreed. I do like the trivia of malloc() likely being "map alloc", and free() originally being called mfree(). The article also quotes Lions, which is a fun r
by syncsynchalt 9y ago
Agreed. I do like the trivia of malloc() likely being "map alloc", and free() originally being called mfree().
The article also quotes Lions, which is a fun read. You get the sense that the Unix philosophy of "everything's a file" originally had a sibling: "everything's an int".
- wahern 9y agoB is typeless, or more precisely has one data type: the computer word. Most operators (e.g. +, -, *, /) treated this as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to be dereferenced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)
- oso2k 9y agoAnd linear addresses and addressing has tons of advantages. Macroarchitecture obviously deal well with word-sized linear addresses and there's all sorts of neat speed up tricks the microarchitecture can use when the word-size can address as much or more than the memory port interface, address lines, cache address lines, TLBs, etc.