DEV Community

Discussion on: πŸš€ Demystifying memory management in modern programming languages

 
deepu105 profile image
Deepu K Sasidharan

Thanks again. I did learn something new now.

I guess you are talking from a lower level, like assembly, point of view and I'm talking from a high-level language point of view.

  1. Agree at a low level that it would be same, but since I'm talking about how languages handle memory, I think accessing Heap is still slower than accessing Stack at language level, might not be by much, but even if you count by instructions, it still has to do few more steps to read from heap compared to stack. Even a low-level language like Rust, for example, says the same. See this doc.rust-lang.org/1.30.0/book/firs...

The stack is very fast, and is where memory is allocated in Rust by default. But the allocation is local to a function call, and is limited in size. The heap, on the other hand, is slower, and is explicitly allocated by your program. But it’s effectively unlimited in size, and is globally accessible.

  1. I'm talking about individual data(variables & constants) and it has to be finite at compile time for most languages(Java, Rust, Go, etc) to be on Stack and you cannot have buffers on the stack in these and since the language automatically manages these we have no control over this. I guess C/C++ is an exception when you manage memory yourself, but then again they are very low-level languages. So yes this is very much language-dependent I would say but holds for most languages IMO.

  2. Yes, it makes absolute sense at a low level. At a higher level, its easier to talk of it as LIFO though as the inner process is not exposed to end users in most languages