Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

Re:Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likel... by bluGill on Friday May 21, 2021 @09:11AM (#27233560)

Back then C was a high level language. Programmers regularly dropped down to assembly (or even raw machine bytes) when they needed the best performance. Now C is considered low level and compilers can optimize much better than you can in almost all cases so more programmers are only vaugly aware of assembly.

Though you are correct, a lot of abstraction today makes things portable in ways that in the past they were not. The abstraction has a small performance and memory cost which wouldn't have been acceptable now, but today it is in the noise (cache misses are much more important and good abstractions avoid them)

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Re:Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likel... by astrange on Saturday May 22, 2021 @07:02AM (#27245367)

> Now C is considered low level and compilers can optimize much better than you can in almost all cases so more programmers are only vaugly aware of assembly.

This is not true, compilers don’t generate super-optimized asm output from C. It’s actually not that optimizable because eg the memory access is too low level so there are aliasing issues.

But optimizing doesn’t actually help most programs on modern CPUs so it’s not worth improving this.

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