3 ms·

I really wish the article would then follow up with much more depth. The presentation is good, and then it just stops. My brain was definitely desiring more.

• kobeya 9y ago
  I recommend writing a memory allocator. And then throwing it out and never using it because there are better off the shelf solutions, but now you'll understand why. Or read one of the white papers that accompanies new memory allocators. There's a couple good ones but I'm on mobile and can't pull them up. I did so once, in my confused and reckless youth when I thought I could do better. I was running a level loader for a game, in 30 to 40% of the load time was being spent in memory allocation. How hard can that be I thought? Turns out there's a whole heap (hah!) of trade-offs to be made, and a frightening amount of edge cases and performance concerns to be had with general allocation strategies. There is a wide spread belief that it is near impossible to design algorithms that scale horizontally with added cores. I'm convinced this belief started in academia with people writing memory allocators. The real takeaway I learned was to avoid memory allocation whenever and wherever possible, which actually works quite well. Edit: Also the speech to text I'm using wants to transcribe memory allocator as memory alligator. I almost let that one stand. You should touch the allocator about as often and with as much caution as you want to touch an alligator.