On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Jack Coats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tapes for working data etc were the technology of the day. Archival, > working and temp storage, even bringing in bits of programs (overlays) > from tape was not that unusual. As hardware has gotten cheaper, we > throw that at a problem rather than brain cells, [...]
In our defense, brain cells are precious. So is time. Apparently different eras have very different views on trading space for speed. For example, Knuth's discussion of dynamic memory allocation talks about best-fit and first-fit algorithms. This is good stuff, still useful--but you really don't want to implement malloc this way, not today. For that you want size-classes and freelists, because they avoid fragmentation and they are much, much faster. In other words, if you needed a dynamic memory allocator, and you went straight to Knuth, you would be led horribly astray. You would be scraping for bytes, when bytes are in plentiful supply and milliseconds are not. I need to keep plugging at it, but it's a lot of extra thinking to figure out what's still relevant, and in what situations. -j --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
