Questions tagged [memory-management]
For questions related to managing memory in programming languages, whether manually or automatically.
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What was the rationale for making realloc(ptr, 0) have UB in C23
This is the first breaking change that C made, which was making realloc(ptr, 0) have UB instead of being roughly equivalent to ...
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Are there languages making addresses to have other significant meaning?
Some examples:
To support checking whether an object is of a subclass of a specific class in constant time, in a language using single inheritance, the compiler could arrange the vtables of classes ...
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Possible to mix garbage collection and manual memory management?
Do you think it is possible to have a language that uses garbage collection (GC) by default, but allows you take more control with manual memory management like C++ or Rust, in areas of the software ...
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X86-64 Assembly for Recursive Functions
A compiler I'm writing generates the following x86-64 assembly (AT&T syntax) for a recursive factorial function. I convert the assembly into an ELF executable using ...
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Why did Objective-C remove `NSZone`?
NSZone is a type representing a memory allocation. NSObject implements the allocWithZone: ...
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Why might a language avoid reallocation?
In Java, the size of arrays are immutable. However, to my understanding, they are still allocated on the heap, because Java allocates almost everything on the heap. Even then, Java arrays are still ...
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Memory layout from a native class
I think there are languages where most of the standard library is written in themselves, however with most things marked as native or ...
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Approaches for implementing weak references
How can weak references (weakrefs) be implemented, and how do the different approaches compare?
The most important considerations for implementing weakrefs are:
Safety ─ a weakref shouldn't allow ...
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Could ownership be inferred?
Rust famously has the concept of ownership vs. borrowing as part of its type system. This allows some level of automatic memory management ─ that is, heap allocations are freed when their owner goes ...
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Is it possible to extend C to have the Rust concept of ownership for memory safety?
Rust has a number of memory safety features. Is it possible to extend or enhance C or C++ to also provide similar memory safety features instead of using workarounds such as the Valgrind tool suite?
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