Tag
memory-layout
- Oct 10, 2026 Where Address-Space Randomisation Gets Its Entropy Which regions are randomised, how many bits of entropy each actually receives, and why a single leaked pointer can undo the whole arrangement. security
- Aug 27, 2026 Stride, Misalignment, and the Cost of a Bad Layout How stride and alignment interact to add sectors to every warp request, why a row-major array accessed by column collapses bandwidth, and what a shared-memory transpose costs in return. gpu computing
- Jul 9, 2026 Cache Behaviour and Node Layout in Disjoint-Set Arrays Why a find is a dependent-load chain, how index width and array splitting change the number of cache lines touched, and what key remapping costs before the first union. data structures
- Nov 6, 2025 Ownership Across the FFI Boundary and Who Frees What Two runtimes with two allocators meet at a foreign function call, and every pointer that crosses must have an unambiguous owner, layout, and deallocation routine. systems programming
- Sep 18, 2025 Array of Structs or Struct of Arrays How element stride decides which fields a scan pulls into cache, when splitting a record into parallel columns pays, and what the split costs elsewhere. data structures
- Aug 13, 2025 Row-Major Layout and the Address Arithmetic Behind Indexing How a pair of subscripts becomes one byte offset, why the last subscript varies fastest, and what traversal order does to cache-line consumption. data structures
- May 10, 2025 Linker Scripts: Why Sections Have Two Addresses How a linker script assigns load and virtual addresses, why initialised data needs a copy step at startup, and what happens to sections the script does not mention. embedded systems
- Apr 24, 2025 Bit-Packed Integer Arrays and Vectorized Decoding How fixed-width packing puts k-bit integers into words, why decoding costs more than encoding, and how SIMD shuffles make unpacking cheap. data structures
- Feb 11, 2025 Uninitialised Memory, Padding, and the Cost of Assuming Zero Uninitialised bytes are not merely arbitrary values, they are a distinct state the optimiser tracks, and the distinction changes what a byte copy, a comparison, and a length assignment may legally do. systems programming
- Jun 5, 2024 Unrolled Linked Lists and the Cost of a Cache Miss per Node Packing several elements per node cuts pointer chases by the node capacity, and the block size that minimises total cost follows from a cache line and a word. data structures
- Sep 15, 2023 Framebuffer Arithmetic: What a Bitmap Mode Costs in Memory Character cells versus linear bitmaps, the byte counts each requires at common resolutions, and why early machines split the difference with attribute bytes and planar layouts. computing history
- Apr 27, 2023 Intrusive Linked Lists: Embedding the Link in the Payload How intrusive chains eliminate per-element allocation and let one object sit on several lists at once, at the cost of type knowledge and ownership rules. data structures