undefined | Better HN

0 pointsavgcorrection2y ago0 comments

What was difficult about what I wrote?

0 comments

Your criticism that a broken wire is outside the scope of the TCP protocol was clear and valid.

The subsequent paragraphs about garage collection are tough to follow. You have multiple parenthetical remarks, a quotation which I think is used as emphasis, italics used as emphasis, compound sentence fragments joined by an em-dash and a colon in the same sentence, rhetorical questions which presumably have obvious answers but not obvious to me, terms that aren't clear (e.g. what is an "amortized push"?), and concepts that don't seem to be related to GC (e.g. an "abstract list" can be implemented without GC, so why is that included in that paragraph?).

I've read those paragraphs 4-5 times now, and I don't think I understand what you are trying to say.

bombela2y ago

amortized push: a fundamental data structure, the vector, is a growable array of elements. The standard name for the function that appends an element at the end of the array is "push". You push to the array.

A vector points to an allocated portion of memory. When full, a new one; usually double the size; is allocated, everything copied over, and the original allocation is discarded.

Therefore the cost of memory allocation and copy is amortized over many pushs.

avgcorrectionOP2y ago

I’ll try to do better in the next life.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse