Compilers

There are 7 posts filed in Compilers.

Writing a Memory Allocator

  1. Video lecture
  2. Mutator, Allocator, Collector
  3. Memory block
  4. Allocator interface
  5. Memory alignment
  6. Memory mapping
  7. Freeing the objects
  8. Blocks reuse
  9. First-fit search
  10. Assignments
    1. Next-fit search
    2. Best-fit search
    3. Blocks splitting
    4. Blocks coalescing
    5. Explicit Free-list
    6. Segregated-list search
    7. Optimizing the storage
    8. Custom sbrk
  11. Conclusion

This is the 6th lecture from the Garbage Collection Algorithms class, devoted to the automatic memory management.

Before discussing algorithms of collecting the garbage, we need to see how these objects (which eventually become a garbage) are allocated on the heap. In today’s lecture we consider mechanisms of memory allocation.

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MIPS Assembly parser

MIPS architecture is used in many embedded systems today, including gaming consoles, routers, and other devices. It is a RISC architecture, which makes decoding of the instructions easier, and the number of basic instructions is not that big (in contrast with CISC architecture, used e.g. in x86). This makes MIPS a good learning architecture, and that’s why it’s often used in universities in compiler class for code generation. And as a part of course for implementing a virtual machine for a subset of MIPS instructions, I have built the parser for its assembly. Continue reading →