Academic Talk on Fri 15th November 2013

Veltas (Chris Leonard) is doing a talk on The Heap.

"This is a data structure that maintains dynamically allocated memory for native applications. Often used without much question, the heap and stack are the main resources for memory in all native applications (and some other types of programs). The talk shall be going into how this is implemented through joint efforts from the program itself, the standard libraries, and the operating system's kernel.

"This talk requires a basic knowledge of programming to make it interesting, although anyone with a vague interest in programming should be able to understand the content. I shall give a brief introduction to what the heap and stack are, how they are useful to the programmer, and will quickly get into the interesting bits that might be useful but are probably just interesting to know.

"To get the most out of this talk it would help to have a vague idea what big-O notation is, how to write a program (not necessarily native), and have an appreciation of the basic structure of a computer (i.e. CPU, memory, etc.).

"If you've used C/C++/Java (and possibly others) heap memory is what's allocated with things like 'malloc' and 'new'."

As always, signups are just for an idea of numbers. You need not sign up if you're coming, and you need not come if you sign up.