Heap memory allocation via new and delete (or malloc or free for C) are unavoidable for more complex, large scale programs. However, it is a common misconception that free/delete will actually free the memory back to the operating system for other processes to use.

This is because there are actually two different types of memory allocation happening behind a malloc/new call. The first type, reserved usually for smaller allocations (less than 100 kb) uses sbrk(), which is a traditional way of allocating memory in UNIX – it just expands the data area by a given amount. The second type uses mmap() to allocate memory for larger chunks of memory. mmap() allows you to allocate independent regions of memory without being restricted to a single contiguous chunk of virtual address space. A memory mapped region obtained through mmap() upon unmapping will immediately release the memory back to the OS, whereas sbrk() will keep the released memory within the process for future allocations.

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C++ templates are useful constructs to reduce code bloat (I think of them as fancy copy and paste) without any performance overhead at run-time. However, to use them effectively might require some practice. One issue I recently ran into while working with templates is the following:

Suppose I have a generic class Foo<T> that takes a template argument, I need to place Foo<T> in a container to be iterated upon or to be looked up later. However, I might have multiple instantiations of Foo<T> of different types (i.e. int, float, double, bool), this makes it hard to use STL containers since these containers require the elements to be of a single type.

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This is the obligatory “Hello World” post.

After various attempts to use Wordpress, Vue, React, I’ve decided to just switch to Github pages (Jekyll). The setup was fairly painless:

• The official Github pages guide was very helpful
• To re-direct my custom domain (bolu.dev) to the Github pages, I followed Hossain Khan’s guide here: https://medium.com/@hossainkhan/using-custom-domain-for-github-pages-86b303d3918a

The main advantage of moving to Github pages is the ease of setup and migration should I need to do so in the future. There’s no database, almost no-setup, and I can make use of standard git workflows. The posts are in markdown so I can work on it piece-meal whenever I want. Looking forward to see if this motivates me to write more.

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