Hacker News with Generative AI: Memory Management

Golang sync.Pool is not a silver bullet (wundergraph.com)
When it comes to performance optimization in Go, sync.Pool often appears as a tempting solution. It promises to reduce memory allocations and garbage collection pressure by reusing objects. But is it always the right choice? Let's dive deep into this fascinating topic.
Go, Performance Optimization, Programming, Memory Management
4 points by jensneuse 8 hours ago | 0 comments
Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM in 70s led to compression algorithm (pcgamer.com)
Algorithms, Computer Science, History, Programming, Memory Management
3 points by amichail 1 day ago | 0 comments
Understanding Memory Management, Part 4: Rust Ownership and Borrowing (educatedguesswork.org)
This is the fourth post in my planned multipart series on memory management. Part I covers the basics of memory allocation and how it works in C, and parts II and III covered the basics of C++ memory management, including RAII and smart pointers.
Programming, Memory Management, Rust, C++, C
5 points by ekr____ 3 days ago | 0 comments
Vramfs: Vram Based Filesystem for Linux (github.com/Overv)
Unused RAM is wasted RAM, so why not put some of that VRAM in your graphics card to work?
Linux, Operating Systems, Graphics Cards, Memory Management
129 points by signa11 4 days ago | 41 comments
Damon Self-Tuned Memory Tiering Shows Nice Improvement for Linux Servers (phoronix.com)
Linux developer SeongJae Park has posted a set of patches for the Linux kernel's wonderful DAMON code to provide for self-tuned memory tiering that "just works" and is racking up some nice performance wins.
Linux, Memory Management, Performance Optimization, Kernel Development
5 points by rbanffy 14 days ago | 0 comments
Stupid Smart Pointers in C (kevinalbs.com)
Managing memory in C is difficult and error prone. C++ solves this with smart pointers like std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr. This article demonstrates a proof-of-concept (aka stupid) smart pointer in C with very little code. Along the way we'll look at the layout of the 32-bit x86 call stack and write assembly in a C program.
C, Programming, Memory Management, Software Development, Pointers
146 points by seansh 17 days ago | 164 comments
Understanding Memory Management, Part 3: C++ Smart Pointers (educatedguesswork.org)
This is the third post in my planned multipart series on memory management. In part I we covered the basics of memory allocation and how it works in C, and in part II we covered the basics of C++ memory management, including the RAII idiom for memory management. In this post, we'll be looking at a powerful technique called "smart pointers" that lets you use RAII-style idioms but for pointers rather than objects.
C++, Memory Management, Programming, Smart Pointers
5 points by ekr____ 22 days ago | 0 comments
Understanding Memory Management, Part 2: C++ and RAII (educatedguesswork.org)
This is the second post in my planned multipart[1] series on memory management. In part I we covered the basics of memory allocation and how it works in C, where the programmer is responsible for manually allocating and freeing memory. In this post, we'll start looking at memory management in C++, which provides a number of much fancier affordances.
C++, Memory Management, Programming, Software Development
40 points by ibobev 25 days ago | 18 comments
The case of the vanishing CPU: A Linux kernel debugging story (clickhouse.com)
A mysterious CPU spike in ClickHouse Cloud on GCP led to months of debugging, revealing a deeper issue within the Linux kernel’s memory management.
Linux Kernel, Debugging, Cloud Computing, Memory Management
47 points by manish_gill 27 days ago | 5 comments
Zig: A good memory allocator in 200 lines of code (github.com/ziglang)
An allocator that is designed for ReleaseFast optimization mode, with multi-threading enabled.
Programming Languages, Optimization, Memory Management
14 points by signa11 27 days ago | 1 comments
A good memory allocator in 200 lines of code (github.com/ziglang)
An allocator that is designed for ReleaseFast optimization mode, with multi-threading enabled.
Programming, Memory Management, Optimization, Zig Language
8 points by todsacerdoti 28 days ago | 0 comments
Pro .NET Memory Management 2nd Edition (minidump.net)
Let’s take a short break from writing a GC, to talk about Pro .NET Memory Management 2nd Edition. I’m usually not one to self-promote, but I keep being asked when the book will be out, so clearly we haven’t communicated enough about it. Here we go.
.NET, Programming, Memory Management
46 points by Kerrick 29 days ago | 3 comments
Subverting Control with Weak References (jlongster.com)
Weak references are neat. The best language features unlock different kinds of abstractions, and weak references do exactly that. Let me show you why.
Programming, Software Design, Memory Management
5 points by gnabgib 37 days ago | 0 comments
Memory Hell (trynova.dev)
For a JavaScript engine, a garbage collector is one of those things one wishes one could avoid but simply cannot.
JavaScript, Programming, Performance, Memory Management, Garbage Collection
4 points by rbanffy 37 days ago | 1 comments
Neut Programming Language (vekatze.github.io)
Neut is a functional programming language with static memory management.
Programming Languages, Functional Programming, Memory Management
4 points by asicsp 39 days ago | 1 comments
When allocators are hoarding your precious memory (2021) (algolia.com)
While switching to the latest trendy framework or language has become somewhat of a cliché in the engineering world, there are times when upgrading is warranted and necessary.
Memory Management, Software Engineering, Programming
3 points by croemer 42 days ago | 1 comments
If C++ cmpler became smarter would't be opinionated as rust borrowchecker? (ycombinator.com)
I'm not well versed with either language as I was reading the article published https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/21st-century-c/<p>I suddenly thought of the forward looking trajectory of the idea of making c++ compiler smart(er) as to ease the burden of memory copying (section 3) with zero overhead. If one traces this arc it means that one day c++ compilers would be equivalent to the borrow checker?
C++, Rust, Programming Languages, Compiler Optimization, Memory Management
4 points by itissid 43 days ago | 2 comments
TIL: Rust does not prevent memory leaks (ycombinator.com)
I'm not a Rust developer so I have no clues about what Rust does, how it does or why it is the way it is.<p>I had a short interaction on another thread and some user told that Rust does not prevent memory leaks.<p>People talk so much about Rust memory safety and how everything must be rewritten in Rust, but if Rust does not prevent memory leaks why are people so crazy about it?
Programming Languages, Rust, Memory Management, Software Development
26 points by akagusu 43 days ago | 22 comments
Rust Memory Management Explained (infoworld.com)
Rust's ownership and borrowing mechanisms guarantee memory safety at runtime. Here's how to use them in your programs.
Rust, Memory Management, Programming Languages
39 points by unripe_syntax 50 days ago | 53 comments
JEP draft: 4-byte Object Headers (Experimental (openjdk.org)
Reduce the size of object headers in the HotSpot JVM from between 64 and 128 bits down to 32 bits on 64-bit architectures. This will reduce heap size, improve deployment density, and increase data locality.
Java, JVM, Performance, Optimization, Memory Management
8 points by zspitzer 53 days ago | 1 comments
The inevitability of the borrow checker (yorickpeterse.com)
When defining a type in Inko, it's allocated on the heap by default.
Programming Languages, Compilers, Memory Management
140 points by rbanffy 55 days ago | 77 comments
The Inevitability of the Borrow Checker (yorickpeterse.com)
When defining a type in Inko, it's allocated on the heap by default.
Programming, Rust, Memory Management
3 points by YorickPeterse 56 days ago | 0 comments
Go Data Structures (2009) (swtch.com)
When explaining Go to new programmers, I've found that it often helps to explain what Go values look like in memory, to build the right intuition about which operations are expensive and which are not. This post is about basic types, structs, arrays, and slices.
Go, Programming Languages, Data Structures, Memory Management
146 points by rednafi 57 days ago | 77 comments
Show HN: CLR, POC borrow checker for Zig (github.com/ityonemo)
Zig is a famously "unsafe" language. Memory management is done manually, which opens up the possibility of having implementation errors in the code. While many security issues are due to logical implementation errors, memory safety errors are a large and real surface area for released software.
Programming Languages, Security, Memory Management
23 points by dnautics 58 days ago | 1 comments
Practical use of the null garbage collector (2018) (microsoft.com)
Some time ago, I noted that the null garbage collector is a valid garbage collector if the amount of RAM available to the runtime is greater than the total memory requirements of the program.
Garbage Collection, Memory Management, Programming, Computer Science
32 points by jasonthorsness 58 days ago | 12 comments
Rust: Investigating an Out of Memory Error (qovery.com)
TL;DR: We discovered the hard way that when backtrace is enabled, the anyhow library is capturing a backtrace on every error. Only when printing this error in debug format!(”err: {:?}”, error) backtrace’s symbols are resolved to human-friendly names, thus leading to a significant memory increase for your application. If you need backtrace only on panic, you must set two environment variables, RUST_BACKTRACE=1, and RUST_LIB_BACKTRACE=0, to avoid the issue.
Rust, Debugging, Memory Management, Programming, Performance
111 points by erebe__ 78 days ago | 29 comments
YJIT 3.4: Even Faster and More Memory-Efficient (railsatscale.com)
It’s 2025, and this year again, the YJIT team brings you a new version of YJIT that is even faster, more stable, and more memory-efficient.
Programming, Software, Performance, Memory Management, New Releases
5 points by xal 78 days ago | 0 comments
Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C (educatedguesswork.org)
I've been writing a lot of Rust recently, and as anyone who has learned Rust can tell you, a huge part of the process of learning Rust is learning to work within its restrictive memory model, which forbids many operations that would be perfectly legal in either a systems programming language like C/C++ or a more dynamic language like Python or JavaScript. That got me thinking about what was really happening and what invariants Rust was trying to enforce.
Programming, Memory Management, C, Rust
236 points by ekr____ 79 days ago | 92 comments
Writing a simple pool allocator in C (8dcc.github.io)
I found out about pool allocators some time ago, and I really liked its simplicity and high performance, so I decided to write my own. This article was initially inspired by Dmitry Soshnikov’s article.
Programming, C, Memory Management
307 points by 8dcc 87 days ago | 143 comments
Linux Context Switching Internals: Process State and Memory (codingconfessions.com)
How does the Linux kernel represent processes and their state: A breakdown of task_struct and mm_struct
Linux Kernel, Operating Systems, Memory Management, Process Management
180 points by rbanffy 93 days ago | 3 comments