Memory Allocation
Excellent, excellent article! I have a question though.<p>> <i>Couldn't we rearrange the memory to get a block of 6 contiguous bytes? Some sort of defragmentation process?</i><p>> <i>Sadly not. Remember earlier we talked about how the return value of malloc is the address of a byte in memory? Moving allocations won't change the pointers we have already returned from malloc. We would change the value those pointers are pointed at, effectively breaking them. This is one of the downsides of the malloc/free API.</i><p>But why not? Couldn't we store information about old pointers somewhere and match them with new addresses when defragmenting? Some kind of virtual memory driver that would map old pointers to new adresses transparently for the programs? Or would it be too much overhead for too little benefit?