"Compacting the Uncompactable" by Bobby Powers on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2020–2025.
talk · advanced · evergreen
Bobby Powers presents Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that eliminates memory fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ programs by compacting memory. The talk covers how it works despite C's fixed object addresses, and its benefits for programs like Redis.
Recommended as a great talk on solving fragmentation for C/C++ and runtimes like Ruby and Python without code changes.
“There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts.”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
There’s a great paper from the group of Emery Berger, where they merge memory pages that become sparse. A kind of garbage collection for C and C++ languages. There’s also a good presentation about it on youtube. [link] The presentation: ▶ this video
in “Using black magic to make a fast circular buffer (2017)” · View on HN
There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts. Apparently it actually led to memory usage improvements in industrial projects like Redis: ▶ this video
in “Reference count, don't garbage collect” · View on HN
There's an interesting talk [0] from Bobby Powers on how to make a malloc() and free() that perform compaction, to be able to release memory back to the operating system more frequently (and improve cache hit rates, etc.). But this isn't standard at all yet. [1]: ▶ this video
in “How the Python object system works” · View on HN
> but malloc/free based systems also have a relatively high memory overhead due to fragmentation In case you haven't seen it, there's been some interesting progress on that front: ▶ this video
in “Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming” · View on HN