Did you ever saw a char and thought: “Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient”? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5 bytes. The reason this works is, because one unsigned int is a ten digit long number and so I can save one char using 2 digits. In theory you could save 32 different chars using this technique (the first two digits of an unsigned int are 42 and if you dont want to account for a possible 0 in the beginning you end up with 32 chars). If you would decide to use all 10 digits you could save exactly 3 chars. Why should anyone do that? Idk. Is it way to much work to be useful? Yes. Was it funny? Yes.

Anyone whos interested in the code: Heres how I did it in C: https://pastebin.com/hDeHijX6

Yes I know, the code is probably bad, but I do not care. It was just a funny useless idea I had.

    • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      Lol, using RAM like last century. We have enough L3 cache for a full linux desktop in cache. Git gud and don’t miss it (/s).

      (As an aside, now I want to see a version of puppylinux running entirely in L3 cache)

      • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        18 hours ago

        I decided to take a look and my current CPU has the same L1 as my high school computer had total RAM. And the L3 is the same as the total for the machine I built in college. It should be possible to run a great desktop environment entirely in L3.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 days ago

      Cache man, its a fun thing. 32k 32 (derp, 32 not 32k) is a common cache line size. Some compilers realise that your data might be hit often and aligns it to a cache line start to make its access fast and easy. So yes, it might allocate more memory than it should need, but then its to align the data to something like a cache line.
      There is also a hardware reasons that might also be the case. I know the wii’s main processor communicates with the co processor over memory locations that should be 32k aligned because of access speed, not only because of cache. Sometimes, more is less :')

      Hell, might even be a cause of instruction speed that loading and handling 32k of data might be faster than a single byte :').

      Then there is also the minimum heap allocation size that might factor in. Though a 32k minimum memory block seems… Excessive xD