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>What would happen in your utopia is that DaVinci Resolve would fail to start because Firefox or Discord would reserve too much memory.

Great! Then users can annoy devs who write crappy software “I can’t open anything else when discord is open!”

Vs today where the OS essentially conceals crappy software from the user via a billion layers of abstraction and hacks




Well, no, because the tradeoff with static allocation is that you need to allocate all the memory you want upfront. If you're requesting memory via dynamic allocation, you can be less wasteful by only requesting what you need and returning what you don't need to the OS.

In the case of e.g. Firefox, do you really want it to always be doing bookkeeping for 100 tabs when you only need 1? Or having to restart Firefox every time if you've hit the upper limit of tabs? Or just let Firefox dynamically allocate memory as you open more tabs?

There are many compelling reasons for dynamic memory allocation, and "the OS essentially concealing crappy software from the user via a billion layers of abstraction and hacks" is a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.




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