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0 pointsalexvitkov1y ago0 comments

Doing frees/moves/copies on the second stack makes it harder to track the lifetime of allocations, and restricts what you can use it for - to free a block on the stack you necessarily have to free everything after it.

Most programs have a point where you know nothing on it is used and it's convenient (and very performant) to free the entire thing, and that makes it way easier to reason about - when you alloc from it you know your block of memory it's valid until a <RESET> point:

  - For a video game you can <RESET> at the start of every frame
  - For a web server you can alloc a new stack for every incoming request and <RESET> after the request is over
  - For a short-lived program you may not even need to <RESET> at all

0 comments

toolslive1y ago

The <reset> point is indeed what you need to look for but why does it need to be a stack ? I guess it's just a naming thing. I've always looked at it as a scratchpad (that was heap allocated)

nmilo1y ago

You can just pop the second stack at each function return, though that does limit its use to only really scratch-space for dynamically sized objects. Like this: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09/27/. “Arenas” are passed by value so their end pointer will auto reset when the function returns.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

toolslive1y ago

The <reset> point is indeed what you need to look for but why does it need to be a stack ? I guess it's just a naming thing. I've always looked at it as a scratchpad (that was heap allocated)

nmilo1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse