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I don't get the point of this article. All it did was cover some C standard library functions and say that what a GC does is manage the memory lifecycle in lan

I don't get the point of this article. All it did was cover some C standard library functions and say that what a GC does is manage the memory lifecycle in languages like Python. What did other people take from this?

mr_00ff00 4y ago
Maybe this is because you have experience with low level languages, but a lot of this information I would say is not common knowledge for someone who has only ever worked with python/JavaScript (which is a large number of programmers). I have talked to full stack devs that don’t know what the stack and heap is, they think I am talking about leetcode data structures. This is a beginner article for sure, but I think that’s the point
- monocasa 4y ago
  To be fair, even as someone who has low-level code including writing VMs, because of the heavy use of closures in JavaScript it's not immediately obvious when accessing a variable in JS will go through the heap or the hardware stack. What the hardware provides doesn't quite match the semantics of the language and the VM is doing a lot of work/magic to paper over those differences.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > a lot of this information I would say is not common knowledge for someone who has only ever worked with python/JavaScript For python, I believe a correct use of mmap for large files (ex: pickles) could offer a lot of advantages. This was seen recently with the orders-of-magnitude increase in performance for the several hundreds of GB worth of weights, it might extend to other languages.
Karellen 4y ago
I took it as an introduction to manual memory management, specifically in C. It covers pointers/addresses, what they are, the notation for declaring them, finding the address of variables/functions, how they're represented, and how to dereference them. Then the stack and the heap, and how memory is allocated/freed on both. It's a primer on the important concepts, if you've only ever worked with languages that abstract those details away (e.g. python/javascript). And, giving it a bit of a skim, it looks like it does an OK job of that. (But I'm not a beginner there, so what makes sense to me might be taking overly large steps for actual beginners in some places.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
happytoexplain 4y ago
>All it did was cover some C standard library functions and say that what a GC does is manage the memory lifecycle in languages like Python. I don't understand that implication that this is somehow not enough to warrant existing in writing (i.e. that there is "no point").
Ocerge 4y ago
Clearly you aren't the target audience, it's only for us plebs.

mr_00ff00 4y ago

Maybe this is because you have experience with low level languages, but a lot of this information I would say is not common knowledge for someone who has only ever worked with python/JavaScript (which is a large number of programmers). I have talked to full stack devs that don’t know what the stack and heap is, they think I am talking about leetcode data structures. This is a beginner article for sure, but I think that’s the point

monocasa 4y ago
To be fair, even as someone who has low-level code including writing VMs, because of the heavy use of closures in JavaScript it's not immediately obvious when accessing a variable in JS will go through the heap or the hardware stack. What the hardware provides doesn't quite match the semantics of the language and the VM is doing a lot of work/magic to paper over those differences.
csdvrx 4y ago
> a lot of this information I would say is not common knowledge for someone who has only ever worked with python/JavaScript For python, I believe a correct use of mmap for large files (ex: pickles) could offer a lot of advantages. This was seen recently with the orders-of-magnitude increase in performance for the several hundreds of GB worth of weights, it might extend to other languages.

Karellen 4y ago

I took it as an introduction to manual memory management, specifically in C. It covers pointers/addresses, what they are, the notation for declaring them, finding the address of variables/functions, how they're represented, and how to dereference them. Then the stack and the heap, and how memory is allocated/freed on both. It's a primer on the important concepts, if you've only ever worked with languages that abstract those details away (e.g. python/javascript). And, giving it a bit of a skim, it looks like it does an OK job of that. (But I'm not a beginner there, so what makes sense to me might be taking overly large steps for actual beginners in some places.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

happytoexplain 4y ago

>All it did was cover some C standard library functions and say that what a GC does is manage the memory lifecycle in languages like Python. I don't understand that implication that this is somehow not enough to warrant existing in writing (i.e. that there is "no point").

Ocerge 4y ago

Clearly you aren't the target audience, it's only for us plebs.