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Do all programmers program on 64 bit x86 machines? I am not an embedded or systems programmer so I don't have the answer to this question. But does your stateme
by ecshafer 8y ago
Do all programmers program on 64 bit x86 machines? I am not an embedded or systems programmer so I don't have the answer to this question. But does your statement hold true for all of the other chips that uses in the embedded space? If not, then teaching those pointer heavy structures is useful for programmers that go on to use arm or other non x86 chips.
- BubRoss 8y agoI'm not sure why he made a big deal about pointer size. That is not the problem as far as I have seen. Memory latency (in combination with TLB lookups, which can end up also hitting memory latency) is the problem. Everything else he says I completely agree with, but I think pointer sizes muddies the water.
- StefanKarpinski 8y agoDoubling of pointer size doubles the memory overhead (where overhead is defined as memory used that isn't your data). Sure, it's not the worst part of pointer-heavy data structures, but if the overhead is doubled, that's potentially twice as many unnecessary cache misses.