memory management library

[viccuad]

Something that allows us to allocate memory, deallocate memory, copy memory and garbage collect. The latter of which will hardly be needed if we use pagination. (I say we take the hard route and make a dynamic memory allocation routine).

[viccuad]

maybe we can use/fork/whatever this:
https://github.com/0x10c-dev/stdlib/tree/master/mem

[M52]

Hmm I do feel like doing everything ourselves, though we can definitely use snippets of that. Truly dynamic memory allocation leads to fragmentation (gaps between one allocated part and the other) and that is rather hard to remedy. It seems to me that the piece of code you point to does not solve that issue.

To clarify, with the garbage collector I meant the process/code that finds these gaps and trims them. This should run at very specific moments. For example everytime a piece of software is loaded & on boot.

Reason being, if we let this run at a constant rate (say once every minute) then it will cause alot of issues with programs overriding memory that they have no rights to anymore (because the program has moved through memory, but the program itself does not know).

Like I said, dynamic allocation is hard but I think it is worthwhile. It can really help squeeze the most out of every word.

[Liraal]

I think whatever we decide to ultimately do, we need to keep the assigned memory block in one piece. This is especially important for things like the filesystem, where you simply cannot operate on fragmented memory.

[M52]

How about paged memory but make the pages very small?

I am thinking 32-64 words per page here. However, maybe 512-word pages is better seeing as that would fit nicely with floppy disk sectors...

Thoughts?

[ColErr]

I would be fine with 512w, as it fits nicely with sectors, and should be fairly easy to put a simple program in 512 words.

[viccuad]

I also vote for 512w

[dilbertfan]

^

[Liraal]

since it seems like it's going to be pages, I vote for 512w. FS will need modifications anyway.

[dilbertfan]

Memory can be tied to stdio and possibly even Fs swap

[M52]

Yay we have decided something! (I guess?)

[dilbertfan]

We have!

[M52]

Great! Now someone write it down in a specification file of sorts (I still haven't learnt how to use git).

[dilbertfan]

Impossibru! Once I'm done w/ my homeowkr I can start on it, but someone else should start as well, i may not be able to work on it till friday

[M52]

WAIT! Let me add it to this git's wiki. A wiki IMHO is perfect for writing things like this down, its nicer than having seperate files and having to go through five different specs to find what you need.

[Lucus16]

Implemented mem_manager. See wiki page as well. Please test and give feedback.