The Origins of Malloc | Hacker News Reader

The Origins of Malloc

spinellis.gr

54 pointssigna117 comments

This article was rather brief.

Still worth a lot to me.

This comment was rather brief.

Agreed. I do like the trivia of malloc() likely being "map alloc", and free() originally being called mfree().

The article also quotes Lions, which is a fun read. You get the sense that the Unix philosophy of "everything's a file" originally had a sibling: "everything's an int".

  B is typeless, or more precisely has one data type: the
  computer word. Most operators (e.g. +, -, *, /) treated this
  as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to
  be dereferenced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

And linear addresses and addressing has tons of advantages. Macroarchitecture obviously deal well with word-sized linear addresses and there's all sorts of neat speed up tricks the microarchitecture can use when the word-size can address as much or more than the memory port interface, address lines, cache address lines, TLBs, etc.

And yet just as full of information as blog posts thrice its size.

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