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Comment by omnicognate | Hacker News Reader

It's a good technical explanation of how arena allocation (a useful and easily googleable memory management technique) works in practice, in C, along with:

* A lot of arguing that all other ways of dealing with the problem (garbage collectors, RAII, etc) are misguided and make for worse programs. This is a lot more controversial than "arena allocation is useful" but I have some sympathy for it. He's not alone in thinking it. See the "Handmade Network" which this guy is associated with.

* A brief and unnecessary bit of free market fundamentalist politics, which seems par for the course for him.

* A general implication that he came up with this stuff himself, which he didn't. Arena allocation (under that name) dates back to the sixties.

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He talks about gamedev, and arena allocators are common sense in gamedev. It's more like introduction of a gamedev concept to business programming.

Also:

>Learning how to work with arenas entirely revolutionized my experience with writing code in C.

But, right, arena allocator is a tool, not a solution, you still have to invent a solution every time, it's still manual memory management, just an easier one.

> A general implication that he came up with this stuff himself, which he didn't.

How in the world did you get this from the article? Of course I didn't invent it, nor did I ever claim (or imply) that.

I don't think you intended to create that impression, but I didn't go looking for it either. It's created by phrasing like

> In this post, I’ll be presenting an alternative to the traditional strategy of manual memory management that I’ve had success with: the arena allocator.

and

> My approach, on the other hand, is this: instead of assuming that malloc and free were the correct low-level operations, we can change the memory allocation interface...

Together with a complete absence of any reference to the history of the technique or any of the people besides you involved in its development.

It's not an accusation, but it's a clarification worth making as I genuinely think someone without knowledge of the subject could come away thinking you were presenting your own innovation.

If it seems like he is implying he came up with arena allocators himself, that is definitely not intended. I didn't read it like that though.

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