Diving into the Vista Heap

When did "performant" become a word? 

"The new heap infrastructure is more insurant that there won't be any hacking going on"

troposphere wrote:

When did "performant" become a word? 

"The new heap infrastructure is more insurant that there won't be any hacking going on"

It's called the english language. It does evolve. No, the dictionaries are not representative of the language. It's the other way around. Soon performat WILL show up in the dictionaries.

Besides, how did "google" become a verb? Same deal. It's to get a point across in an active voice. Plus it's l33t. The last reason should be all that someone needs

Cheers.

Hello,

I live in Denmark and we have a list of proper Danish words, each year the list is evaluated and new words are added, some are even removed. So untill a word is on the list it is not a proper Danish word - even if it is used quite often.

The organisation that does this work is called "Dansk sprognævn" - "Danish Language Councel". I guess it is important for a small language like Danish.

Many of the latest additions to the list of proper Danish words are actually English words that we use as our own. I am pretty sure "performant" is not on the list.

Thanks Klaus Enevoldsen

AdityaG wrote:



troposphere wrote:When did "performant" become a word?  "The new heap infrastructure is more insurant that there won't be any hacking going on"

It's called the english language. It does evolve. No, the dictionaries are not representative of the language. It's the other way around. Soon performat WILL show up in the dictionaries.

Besides, how did "google" become a verb? Same deal. It's to get a point across in an active voice. Plus it's l33t. The last reason should be all that someone needs

Cheers.

It's true what you say about the language evolving, but you have to bear in mind that every new word (and some old ones) has a Coefficient of People Wanting To Punch You In the Face Every Time They Hear You Say It, lets call it Cpunch.

I'd suggest, from someone who is satisfied with the word "fast", that performant has a pretty high Cpunch.

We use "performant" in german, too. And it's not in the "Duden". But maybe the discussion should better focus on Vista's Heap Manager.

English has been vandalised by a whole sespit of American Marketing/Sales terms, particularly in software. The richness comes from the fact it's 40% French, parts Latin, parts Germanic and so on. However when you see words like performant, and words suffixed with "ize" you can only imagine that the people who made up those words aren't exactly Wordsworth. Energize me!

Anyway that's off topic. Have Microsoft hired a few 'hackers' to have a good old punch at the heap?

rhm wrote:



It's true what you say about the language evolving, but you have to bear in mind that every new word (and some old ones) has a Coefficient of People Wanting To Punch You In the Face Every Time They Hear You Say It, lets call it Cpunch.

I'd suggest, from someone who is satisfied with the word "fast", that performant has a pretty high Cpunch.

I am thinking Cpunch has a higher Coefficient of People wanting to punch you.

Back on topic, I tried to make sense of some of the stuff at the end but it kind of went over my head. But I see they are doing the same thing as the rest of Vista where they add more layers and bringing stuff up closer to user mode. Pretty cool.

Cheers.

I totally agree that it's a kewl video and I'm surprised that the main thing to come out of it was a mini-debate about tech jargon; but I think it's a little bit like watching a lecture of Einstein describing relativistic effects near light speed, and at the end your eyes are glazed over and you really want to say something to illustrate that you showed up and that you're appreciative, but all you can come up with is... hey Einstein, who does your hair?



GN

What about maloc/free and new/delete has the same been done for them?

PS why don't they just call the win32 heat API rather the implementing there own heep?

ringi wrote:

What about maloc/free and new/delete has the same been done for them?

PS why don't they just call the win32 heat API rather the implementing there own heep?

As far as I am aware these are implemented using the Windows API.  I'm curious, though, as to how one would implement a heap without using OS provided functionality?

If you are aware of a specific implementation of new/delete that implements it's own heap I would like to take a look at it

Charles wrote:



Agreed. Please stay on topic. There is some very interesting information in this video. I'm surprised nobody is talking about this stuff...

C

Maybe like me people had to stop the video half way through because they couldn't understand a word Adrian was saying. I don't mean any disrespect, it's a consequence of having lots of nationalities working for your company.

rhm wrote:



Maybe like me people had to stop the video half way through because they couldn't understand a word Adrian was saying. I don't mean any disrespect, it's a consequence of having lots of nationalities working for your company.

Yeah unfortunatly this is the case for me.. I just couldn't understand it.

I think there are many people around the world would like to see the video but don't have fast connection speed, you please add an MP3 of the interview
Thanks

michaelr wrote:



ringi wrote: What about maloc/free and new/delete has the same been done for them? PS why don't they just call the win32 heat API rather the implementing there own heep?

As far as I am aware these are implemented using the Windows API.  I'm curious, though, as to how one would implement a heap without using OS provided functionality?

If you are aware of a specific implementation of new/delete that implements it's own heap I would like to take a look at it

Most implementation of new/delete malloc/free ask the OS for LARGE blocks of ram, (e.g.  32K at a time) then split it up into the small chunks that are given out.  I know the Microsoft C++ runtime used to do with, as I have in the past had to look it's code in the debugger after a buffer overrun in the software I was working on.  (On most OSs asking for memory is VERY expensive so a c/c++ program would be match too slow if the runtime pass the request onto the OS each time.)

As I work in C# these days I have not had to look at the Microsoft C++ runtime libs for a few years so don’t know if they now just call into the speed up OS heap functions.

MicroSoft is falling farther behind. A machine of a new design is coming.

A software heap manager is not the answer.  High performance Linux is moving to a hardare garbage collected paralell heap.  (So applications can't deallocate and allocate faster than the heap is compacted.) 

MicroSoft must make the multicore  FPGA/ASIC a Vista.v2 feature so that kernel resources for memory and I/O firmware is updated as part of the OS. Learn something from the IBM mainframes so that specialized algorithms are off loaded to FPGA multicores.  More than that the technology developed in the xBOX with an FPGA/GPU link to the 10MB eDram (NEC) is not followed up on.  

Heap Management and garbage collection is a hardware resource. Google Boyle or pipelined hardware heap garbage collection.  Programmable acceleration that is MS developed and specified is the only way to stay ahead on hardware Linux acceleration.

Vista OS-> loads eDram/ FPGA code instead of DLL's for a single core WINTEL machine.

What's deeply disturbing about this is that MicroSoft is "selling" Vista hardware logos.  MS owes itself to develop (or reward) the platform makers  for windows acceleration of it's OS.

Almost, but not quite. malloc/free or new/delete are C/C++ language specific memory allocation/de-allocation routines. They allow you to create chunks of memory for your own use - untyped blocks in the case of C's malloc or untyped/typed in C++'s new.

Windows itself provides a range of memory allocation routines which are called by various dev platforms etc. to allocate memory on device. This is necessary because in the world of modern OS', running apps do not get complete control over the whole machine and the OS must arbitrate between demands for blocks of memory and the availability of free RAM. When memory is demanded and it's not available, the OS will try to swap read-only data out of memory into a disk-based swap file and allocate some/all of the freed-up RAM to the requesting app.

Why do dev languages implement their own memory management infrastructure? Because asking the OS for memory is not a free operation - it costs time. It's often faster for a dev platform to ask the OS for a chunk of RAM (which can take some time) and then divide this chunk up much more quickly and easily (since it doesn't need to check ACL's, etc) using app-specific algorithms.

This is why memory-management tools like SmartHeap and later versions of VC++ could deliver magnificent perf improvements over the standard C RTL malloc.

In more modern languages and environments such as Java or CLR, memory is Garbage Collected and the app is generally not in control of its memory - that's left up to the execution engine (e.g. JVM/CLR). The execution engine can deliver massive performance benefits for memory allocation compared to simply call the OS' equivalent of Windows' GlobalAlloc() API.

What the CoreOS team at Microsoft have added is some insanely clever technology which will help deliver massive stability improvements by preventing code from executing in areas in which it's not permitted to - regardless of the toolset used to build the code. That's not to say that Vista's MM (Mmemory Manager) is flawless, but the bar for hackers has now been raised significantly.