Week 8

This past week we had two major things happening. One was the release of the new project, called "Allocator," which is due this coming Thursday and we also had Twitter come to class as a guest speaker. Unfortunately I could not come to class on Friday so I did not hear what they had to say but I am sure it was awesome. We also received our grades back for the test, which in my case were a bit disappointing. I am very certain that, among other questions, I missed the first one, which was implementing the pre increment and post increment functions without using the ++. I already discussed with my study group that we need to improve the way we study for the second test but it's definitely tricky to study for this type of test.

For the project "Allocator" prof. Downing walked us on Monday through the behavioral structure of it. I remembered much of it from my CS 429 Computer Architecture course where they went in depth to explain how a memory allocator chooses which blocks to give out what it does with them when it gets them back. So the theory I understand pretty well. My partner and I are in the process of starting to implement it. I think that one of the key aspects of the memory allocator is the fact that when it gets back small blocks it needs to merge them to always keep large blocks free. We will see how this project turns out.