Hacker News Reader

That sounds like the experience of writing Containerfiles; since steps are cached you want to pull the thing you are iterating on as far down as possible.

View on HN

All of this work has been done before in different contexts. Memory management with bigger blocks and weaker definitions that change whenever some grad student gets a bright idea.

100%. Since you mention memory management: Generational GC is pretty much the same idea: Keep the stuff that's least likely to change an important property (liveness) together.

Conceptually the underlying general idea is to sort things based on stability if you can avoid recomputing properties of the stable part.

It's even closer to prefix matching on super long strings by chunk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com