[samwho]

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this, thank you.

I tried a couple of different ways to introduce the stack and the heap but it always felt like it made the post too long and complicated. In the end I decided to take a pure, idealistic view of memory in order to focus on the algorithms used to pack allocations effectively. You can see some of my abandoned efforts as HTML comments in the post :D

Introducing the 0x prefix and immediately dropping it hurt me as well, but I didn't have a better way to make the visualisation work on mobile. I completely agree with you that it's not ideal.

I'd like to do a post of this style about garbage collection at some point.

[ModernMech]

Maybe make this a series? I think another post just like this on the stack is in order. You could show allocating stack frames with the slider! Then you can put them both together in a third post and show the entire memory layout of a C program.

Would definitely like to see more thoughts from those cute corgis.

[samwho]

A few people suggested a series, but there's a human problem: my attention jumps between topics quite a lot! At the end of this post, and my load balancing post, my main feeling was relief in that I could start looking into a new topic.

Maybe after more time has gone by I can revisit earlier posts and do follow-ups :)

[wrycoder]

Please do, this excellent post is already a good start on the issues involved in creating compacting garbage collectors.

[xigoi]

Is it really necessary to use hexadecimal at all in the article? Decimal works just fine for pointers, it's just not conventionally used.

[samwho]

I went back and forth on this and decided in the end that it makes sense to use hex for 2 reasons:

1. It's what people are going to be exposed to in any material outside of this post. 2. Within this post, it helps distinguish between pointers and sizes/values.