Re: [mildly OT] Some info about Python

[Stefan <ste@...>]

Am 16.01.2020 um 13:03 schrieb Andre Leiradella:
> That was my use case. In my implementation, I didn't allocate new memory 
> when the block was shrinking, in this case I just updated the block 
> header with the new size.
>
> I've also added dlmalloc [1] on top of the linear allocator, dlmalloc 
> would request new memory blocks from the linear allocator whenever it 
> couldn't satisfy an allocation request. You still have a hard limit on 
> the maximum memory for each state, but with 64-bit OSes you can in 
> theory have 4 billion+ 4 GiB linear allocators which should be enough 
> for everyone (TM). Both the Lua and the dlmalloc states were reset with 
> memcpy at the end of script execution, so it wasn't necessary to event 
> close the state to free up memory.

That sounds interesting! Do you want to share the sources?

Btw. the 4 billion allocators won't work in practice. The paging
hardware of current processors seems to only support 48 bits
instead of the full 64 bit, so in fact you are limited to
2 ^ 48 / ( 4 * 1024 ^ 3 ) = 65536 states with 4GiB each.
Although this is still a lot, it can be exhausted.

Greetings