The history of Unix's confusing set of low-level ways to allocate memory (2018)

Re:The history of Unix's confusing set of low-level ways to ... by guerrilla on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @09:24PM (#29090014)

I'm not sure what's supposed to be confusing here but one thing I don't know is why it was called the heap. Did they use heap data structures or something?

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Re:The history of Unix's confusing set of low-level ways to ... by bodhiandphysics on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @09:42PM (#29090140)

As far as I can tell, the term heap comes from Algol 68. Algol 68 had garbage collection, and used mark and sweep. Mark and sweep works by searching memory like a tree, starting at the stack, so Algol 68 called this memory heap memory (at this point, heap was often used to just mean any tree). Languages like pascal and c also began calling their dynamic memory region the heap.

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Re:The history of Unix's confusing set of low-level ways to ... by afr0ck on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:23AM (#29091086)

I am a not a native speaker but Google Dictionary says this:

Heap: "an untidy collection of objects placed haphazardly on top of each other". Example: "a heap of cardboard boxes"

This makes sense as the Unix Heap is just a space containing a random collection of objects with random sizes.

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