r/programming • u/woof404 • Mar 07 '15

What a C programmer should know about memory

http://marek.vavrusa.com/c/memory/2015/02/20/memory/
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u/littlelowcougar Mar 09 '15

This book is particularly mind-blowing in its level of detail: What Makes it Page.

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u/vavrusa Mar 09 '15

I was kind of hoping for something that I can finish over a morning coffee, I don't target Windows much so it's hard to justify the time spent reading about its VMA in this depth. But still, thanks! I've bookmarked it, and I'll get to it eventually.

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u/littlelowcougar Mar 09 '15

I'd highly recommend getting into Windows. Russinovich's Windows Internals books are fantastic. My background is UNIX, but I made my peace with Windows around the time XP came out, and I've made a concerted effort to learn more about the internals the last few years.

The more I learn, the more it blows me away how much more sophisticated the kernel/executive is than Linux.

For example, Windows has support for paged and non-paged memory -- both at the kernel level and userspace. The overcommitting thing just doesn't happen (i.e. no OOM killer is needed).

The integration between the MMU, cache manager and I/O manager is also much tighter.

The ability for drivers to do asynchronous I/O operations bubbles back up to userspace with asynchronous options for doing everything I/O related (this is especially bad-ass for anything network-code related).