“Old Time” Coding Techniques
I found this story to be rather amusing for several reasons. For starters, I’ve been around in the industry long enough to remember using almost all of these techniques as a part of my job. But, the main thing for me is that these approaches are still in use today for edge conditions.
For example, take a gander at this section of the document:
Memory management
Until the past decade or so, RAM and storage were amazingly limited, so efficient programming required impressive but time-consuming work-arounds. For example, developers had to spend a lot of time keeping track of memory allocation and deallocation — a process later known as “garbage collection.” Otherwise, they spent a lot more time fixing memory leaks (unintentional memory consumption) that eventually crashed the computer. … Today, just about every development environment has a decent garbage collector.
And, in general, this is true. Even the cheapest computers have gigabytes of memory on them. And, as a result, we’ve have ever-growing bloatware as programmers no longer need to pay attention to the memory footprint of their apps.
Consider for a moment, though, the world of developing for RTOS. While the amount of elbow room on a chip does increase (with pseudo-fidelity to Moore’s Law), there’s still not enough to be wasteful in your efforts. So, memory management is still a big deal in that environment.
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