
The Origins of Malloc - signa11
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20170914/
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mywittyname
This article was rather brief.

~~~
syncsynchalt
Agreed. I do like the trivia of malloc() likely being "map alloc", and free()
originally being called mfree().

The article also quotes Lions, which is a fun read. You get the sense that the
Unix philosophy of "everything's a file" originally had a sibling:
"everything's an int".

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wahern

      B is typeless, or more precisely has one data type: the
      computer word. Most operators (e.g. +, -, *, /) treated this
      as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to
      be dereferenced. 
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_\(programming_language\))

~~~
oso2k
And linear addresses and addressing has tons of advantages. Macroarchitecture
obviously deal well with word-sized linear addresses and there's all sorts of
neat speed up tricks the microarchitecture can use when the word-size can
address as much or more than the memory port interface, address lines, cache
address lines, TLBs, etc.

