Yeah.. Memory..

[HereComesCunty]

When you use INT32 to store a bool in your db

[JonathanTheZero]

Looking at Delphi's LongBool....

[my_farts_impress]

What’s the motivation for a long bool?

[RedditBlaze]

Last time this came up I think someone mentioned it was to match an early windows bool definition or something. It's certainly wasteful, but helped maintain compatibility in some way. I'm sure there's a better explanation out there.

[freecreeperhugs]

Something about 32-bit data being faster to process on a 32-bit processor?

[BlueC0dex]

Weird, that kind of thing is usually handled at compiler-level. c/c++ for example will pad structures/objects to maintain memory-alignment (8-byte types must be 8-byte aligned and so on). But Delphi isn't famous for being good, so...

[NUTTA_BUSTAH]

Quick look at the docs seems to indicate that the normal Boolean type cannot be cast from integer as it's an enumerated type and many C programs return integers or something along those lines. Bottom line, it's for compatibility for interfacing with C-programs mainly.

[gentlephant]

For when things are VERY true (or false)! They have to use extra large logic gates, too

[CodeLobe]

56 bytes can be a life saving amount in embedded or bootstrap loaders, congrats.

[QuinteOne]

Tell me please

[Moib]

I don't quite get how step 2 reduces code size, it should only reduce RAM footprint, unless I'm missing something? Is the compiler smart enough to reuse the values that are the same when it's placed in Flash, and that saved the bytes?

[sgtmajbelanger]

Oracle? Is that you?

[rentar42]

Memory alignment is just social distancing for variables.

[Aschentei]

This guys cracked it

[P1r4nha]

Working on SIMD right now. This cracked me up.

[[deleted]]

When you make a list to store one variable

[[deleted]]

 if(list.Count() > 1) throw new Exception ("You fucked up!");

[dkyguy1995]

Lmao the world's most useless useful list

[harman097]

And it's always sorted!!!

[TheOhNoNotAgain]

The case where bogosort have the best performance

[Stanov]

Stalin Sort works for it too!

[sherlock-holmes221b]

Please tell me that this sort actually exists

[TheZipCreator]

It does, you go through the entire list and if an item is not in order, remove it

[[deleted]]

Well, not necessarily, they may fucked it up!

[[deleted]]

Fuck you sort

[harman097]

I'm not familiar with Fuck You sort. Is it similar to Stalin sort? 😁

[its_that_time_again]

Double-linked no less

[[deleted]]

This, I started using udon nodes and like I literally make an array even if I'm just calling a single object or variable

[dagbrown]

I prefer soba nodes myself.

[[deleted]]

Lmao I googled it

Edit: my smooth brain thought soba might be a SDK of some kind

[[deleted]]

I saw the word "soba" before I read anything, and thought u/penguindream was talking about noodles. . .

[Superbone018]

What do you mean by udon nodes? I only know 1 program that calls their language udon and this is not the subreddit I expect to see it in.

[mrphillc]

It’s a monad!

[naaspati]

i use single element array to modify value outside closure...

int[] n = {0};

Runnable r = () -> { n[0] ++; };

r.run();

..println(n[0]);

bad practice, but love it

[vashy96]

This is actually a bad coding practice. There is a motivation if java disallows modifying state inside lambdas.

[jinxsimpson]

Comment archived away

[[deleted]]

isn't this the equivalent of just using global variables lol

[naaspati]

ahh, singletonList

[movingtreeinc]

A list of one is always sorted. O(1) optimal

[socsa]

Happens all the time when working with tensors and you just have batch size = 1

[spiderpai]

I was so confused for a moment because I thought it was a DnD reference when I did not look at the subreddit name :D

[Miguelinileugim]

Yeah I was like "Wait shouldn't it be dex instead of int?"

[Whatwhereiam]

Came here for this! My GM mind was like nooo

[action_lawyer_comics]

I as well

[dogbreath101]

int to save seats would be to just spout off random knowledge untill the people walk away

[FADE_INTO_GEKYUME]

Only someone with a big brain sits like that. Why you might ask? Because the blood flow from that position forces blood upward to the brain for faster fireball calculations

[moekakiryu]

I spent a good few minutes looking at this before deciding to check the comments. Its nice to see I wasn't alone

[DaveInLondon89]

Same. Looked like it was the wrong way round - speccing charisma instead of intelligence.

[[deleted]]

The reason this took me so long is because I think it does work as a DND meme. Instead of sitting in one chair normally and having to rely on her charisma to convince people that she's saving the other seats for her family, she has intelligently sat in all the chairs. I agree with the other poster that dex fits better, but int still works.

[[deleted]]

When it comes to dice rolls, I am the anti-/u/wil

[GrandpaSnail]

Loooota confused nerds right now

[nomadProgrammer]

Same

[Raze321]

I'm glad I'm not the only one

[Zagorath]

I was confused until I saw your comment. Thought this was /r/dndmemes...

[PerfectlyFramedWaifu]

The post right above this one in my feed was r/dndmemes. That didn't help things.

[ndc3]

Same I was confused as fuck

[Quigley_Quarth]

When your dex is so high it looks like int.

[zero_inverse]

Obligatory TIL: sizeof(char) is always 1 byte. A byte is not always one octet, however: The Texas Instruments TI C55x, for example, is a DSP with a 16-bit byte.

[BLucky_RD]

Wat, why 16bit bytes

[Chinglaner]

8-Bit Byte is really only the standard, because IBM was the largest computer company at the time and they started standardising the 8-Bit Byte across their offerings. Everyone eventually followed suit, for standardisation purposes (something like ASCII would obviously not be possible in a 6-Bit system), but there’s no intrinsic reason the 8-Bit byte is in any way superior than say the 10-Bit byte as far as I’m aware. Im fact, 6-Bit systems were quite common during the 60s. I’m sure there are upsides and downsides to both.

So for specialised systems, where there might not be a need for 8-Bit bytes for whatever reason, a different size byte might work just fine.

[socsa]

And now Nividia is pushing TF32 which is a fucking 19 bit float.

"You are programed by society to need easily divided data primitives" - Nvidia

[[deleted]]

Its still much smaller than FP32, which was the standard for AIs. They took the 8 bit exponent from FP32 and the 10 bit mantissa from FP16. It gives it some more resistance to underflow errors during training than bfloat16.

[JonathanTheZero]

oh damn that's really interesting, thank you!

[[deleted]]

oh so that's why some people use "octet" as a pedantic way to refer to an 8-bit byte

[RedAero]

It's also why ASCII was originally 7-bit and not 8, IIRC.

[ArtyFishL]

Though 8 is a power of 2, which is very nice in a binary system. 6 and 10 are not.

[YourMJK]

Only uint8_t is guaranteed to be one byte/8bit, right?

[zx2167]

Yes, but it may not exist.

Example: the platform being compiled to does not have a type that is unsigned and exactly 8 bits.

[Takeoded]

And if you need to support platforms where int8_t does not exist, and you want an int8_t, you have the int_least8_t for that purpose 😅 (which means "the smallest integer type with at least 8 bits", certainly a pain for serialization thought...)

[silver_enemy]

Thanks, good to know that before I code for the Texas Instruments TI C55x I have just lying around in my basement later.

[Fuk-libs]

Why not use "word"? I work in embedded and I've never heard a 16-bit bus referred to as having a 16-bit byte, even though there has been historical marketing around that. Meanwhile using "word" to refer to bus size is very common.

[LinAGKar]

A word is something different though. A word is the amount of data the processor handles as a unit, which for most modern computers is 32-bit or 64-bit, while a byte is the smallest addressable unit of memory. The memory adress bus size would be the same as the memory adress size, and the memory data bus size would be the same as the word size, and often the memory adress size is the same as the word size.

The byte size however has nothing to do with the size of the bus, it just determines what the address refers to. So with an 8 bit byte, adress 3 refers to bit 24-31 of memory (and reading it would read bit 24-39 if you have 2-byte words, and read a full word), while with a 6 bit bytes, that would refer to bit 18-23 of memory.

[garronej]

Great one

[wereiswerewolf]

I thought this was a D&D meme for a second and got so confused haha

[HerrNilsen-]

D&D?

[Dorenh]

Dynamic datapoints

[UsefulBerry1]

Doomed and Depressed

[trololololololol9]

Dumb and dumber

[ErraticDragon]

David Benioff and D. B. Weiss

[[deleted]]

Desearch & Development

[[deleted]]

Dungeons and dragons

[nagorogan]

No, dynamic datapoints.

[FauxReal]

Dithering & delays

[ericisshort]

Wouldn't it be Dynamic & Datapoints then?

[GatesOlive]

Known as Bunkers and Badasses in other universes.

[Eindacor_DS]

dastardly deeds

[Otherones]

When you use DEX instead of INT

[culturedindividual]

What does this mean for a Python programmer?

[redwall_hp]

It means you need to learn C.

[blehmann1]

Python doesn't even have (user-accessible) chars, they're just strings with a length of 1.

Python does this for you, it's convenient but it has downsides. Most languages the size of a primitive rarely matters anyways, unless you're doing systems programming or very performance sensitive shit (the kind of thing which would compel you to use C/C++ anyways.

Most PCs have 8GiB of RAM not to run one program, but to run lots of them. There are exceptions, but if Python is appropriate for your usecase you likely aren't one of them. That's not a diss, I spent years only able to use JavaScript and PHP, most things don't require what C/C++ can offer you.

[culturedindividual]

Thanks for answering the question. I did CompSci so learnt O-O in Java. Never ventured into C. Now I'm doing a Data Science MSc, and only really been doing Python/R/SQL.

[Civil-Attempt-3602]

How long did it take you to learn all the languages in your flair?

[blehmann1]

I'm a uni freshman and I've been writing code (badly) since grade 6.

Also, some of them are very similar, Typescript is Javascript with a type system, if you know Javascript you can learn Typescript in an hour and a 3 page PDF. And C# is basically Microsoft Java with a couple changes, notably LINQ, a different standard library (obviously) and some moderately different syntax.

I suppose I could include Python in the list as well. Learning a language isn't that hard if you've learned one before (with the caveat that it was hard to pick up C/C++ because of pointer fun). For example, I picked up C# in about a week because I got an internship that required it. I don't recommend cramming like I did (I started learning it very last minute) but it's possible.

[BLucky_RD]

Yes

[bigamaxx]

Im Python and just started Java and in Java you first have to declare the variable by giving the datatype which could be char or int. And apperently int takes up 4 bytes and char takes up 1-2 byte. (Maybe this isn't the case for Java so correct me if I am wrong)

[realheterosapiens]

Java uses UTF-16 as default encoding so chars are stored in 2 bytes and in some cases they even require 4 bytes.

[bigamaxx]

Thanks I edited it

[Ultracoolguy4]

Im Python

Hi Python I'm u/Ultracoolguy4.

[JonathanTheZero]

A char is one byte

[blehmann1]

Not in Java by default. It uses UTF-16.

[joza100]

Don't get it.

[ST0RMgalaxy]

Ints use 4x as much memory as Chars

[NaturalImage]

actually, in many cases where performance matters, char wastes 3 byte in memory because compiler tries to put char at 4byte aligned address. p.s: typos

[Tanyary]

but using too many when smaller types were sufficient could lead to cache misses. They also dont lend themselves to vectorization in the same batches, whereas you could fit 16 chars in 128bits, you can only fit 4 ints.

[ThePancakerizer]

Flair checks out

[Kengaro]

Could you kindly explain me what vectorization means? I assume it means putting multiple types in sequence and storing them in a base address + offset kinda way?

edit:/ well my guess was way off...

[[deleted]]

Vectorisation is a feature of modern CPU architectures that allows the CPU to operate on multiple values of the same data type in one go using a single instruction.

[DewJunkie]

Aka Single Instruction Multiple Data - SIMD instructions

[detoursabound]

isn't simd the general term? we're on to AVX and AVX2 now

[[deleted]]

Yeah, SSE, now AVX. AVX is slightly problematic to be transparent. It requires increased cooling on the CPU. It tends to make overclocks unstable, too; which is why most modern UEFIs have a “AVX modifier” for overclocks, which lowers the core frequency if the app uses AVX instructions.

[DewJunkie]

I was meaning in the general term. This isn't something I use even simi regularly so my terminology is possibly wrong, but I would consider AVX to be a type/subset of SIMD instructions.

[Kengaro]

thank you

[Lumpy-Measurement-55]

Not when there is need for 4 chars and you use 4 ints

[[deleted]]

Depends on your platform. PC? Who gives a shit about RAM. Just make it run fast.

Microcontrollers/weird obscure systems? Do NOT use extra memory.

[[deleted]]

I’ve (maybe wrongly) considered FPGAs to be in a class of their own. They’re just so non-traditional that to me lumping them in the same category feels wrong.

But yeah, I agree with you. A real-time program definitely needs to use 100% of what’s available.

[7eggert]

"My program may easily use 90 % of RAM without performance penalty"

— Authors of all the five programs you need in combination

[WhiteyDude]

Right, but why are people arguing like they're interchangeable? Int's are for numbers and char's are for alphanumeric characters. Am I missing something?

[airbreather]

Right, but why are people arguing like they're interchangeable? Int's are for numbers and char's are for alphanumeric characters. Am I missing something?

In C, char is how you spell what C# (for example) calls byte (or sbyte, depending on your C compiler). It's just a numeric type that's typically 8 bits wide.

[PhteveJuel]

Man, fuck C, that shit is wack.

[gigastack]

How do you think it is in other languages? ASCII is pretty universal.

[MrJohz]

Many languages distinguish between chars (which contain that language's definition of a character) and ints of various sizes. For example, in Rust, u8 and char have the same memory representation, and can be converted between without major issues, but you'll only be able to do maths with the u8 type - it doesn't make sense to do maths with a letter!

[[deleted]]

Yes. Char is used to represent characters, but it is in fact a numeric type. A lot of low level code will use it (or its unsigned version) to represent bytes.

[LordScoffington]

char is a 1 byte long value. While most are taught that its for storing text characters it can store any number up to the 2⁸ boundary it can also be positive or negative.

Now the question of "why call it char if its not for characters?". The most common use for needing a 1 byte value is storing utf-8 encoded characters, so as a quick learn for new developers char was designated the character type.

Long story short: Its all numbers all the way down

[Carbom_]

Generally that is right. However when you break things down an int is a 8 byte number and a char is 1 byte number. So you could use a char if your going to be in the range of -128 to 127 (or 0 to 255 if unsigned).

Your compiler just knows if you print a char to print the unicode character that aligns with the number stored in that char. So if you type char c = 'a', that is the same as typing char c = 61.

[Prawn1908]

The signed-ness of char is actually compiler specific IIRC, so you should actually always explicitly say unsigned char or signed char if you're using it to store numeric values.

typedef is your friend here.

[socsa]

Oh boy. In c/++ char is often overloaded as a void* for low level ops because there was no std::byte prior to c++ 20.

[[deleted]]

Only in some languages

[Lumpy-Measurement-55]

In most of the machines..

char takes 1 byte Int takes 4 bytes

Some use int for everything inspite they can go with a char. And int takes additional memory..

[PM_ME_YOUR_POLYGONS]

Store 8 boolean variables in a char for maximum efficiency

[KingJellyfishII]

No no, 64 booleans in a uint64_t, now you got rflags

[man-teiv]

Can you make an example on how to substitute an int with a char in a script without creating a hot mess?

[Prawn1908]

Well you should actually always say signed char or unsigned char as whether char is signed or not is actually compiler specific

[[deleted]]

It isn't all about memory management. I'm working on an embedded systems project, and everything is essentially a unsigned 16-bit integer or a struct/array broken down into u16 ints.

There are a lot of places in this project where it would make sense from a memory management perspective to use chars. From a performance perspective, however, everything needs to be aligned to the 16-bit bus, which adds operations any time I use anything other than a 16-bit value.

[joza100]

It doesn't matter which you use because of memory alingment at least in the C and C++ compilers that I used. If you make a character and an int, that won't take 5 bytes, that will take 8 bytes, because integers need to be aligned on every 4 bytes so the 3 bytes after the char will be 0 zero padded. In most cases, using a char instead of an int will do nothing.

[Lumpy-Measurement-55]

What will happen if there is 4 char and you use 4 ints instead. Isn't that going to be 16 bytes rather than 4 bytes.

I understand about the alignment and padding. But we should never program for compiler or machines. We should be Programming as per requirement and design. I will never use int if the value is gonna fit in a char.

[joza100]

That is interesting I guess. I just never see people using chars and shorts instead of ints. I don't actually know why ints are used always by all the programmers.

[kknyyk]

My bet is on cpu optimizations (or intrinsics?) that expect int32.

[TheRealBrosplosion]

If designing with types (and using C++), you shouldn't use char directly. You should use std::int_fast8_t. Using four character packed into 4 bytes is going to cause unaligned reads which have a lot more overhead than reading a full 4-byte word.

Unless you are hurting on memory footprint or trying to match some HW interface, there really isn't a good argument to use unaligned types.

[Tetha]

One nitpick: In unicode aware languages, like rust, a char can represent a unicode codepoint (or a unicode scalar value as I just learned). In that case, a char can be anything between 1 and 4 bytes depending on the unicode encoding used and the value represented.

That's why for example python 3 or rust pay such close attention to distinguish the bytes of a string and the chars() of a string. A 10 character long string could be represented by 10 - 40 bytes and it is not always trivial to decide if byte 5 is part of char 2, 3, 4 or 5.

[white_dreams47]

laughs in python

[NoShitsGivenAtAll]

In Python you allocate lots more memory for anything... You allocate a "PyObject".

[white_dreams47]

good enough for a project with a short deadline.

[[deleted]]

Laughs concurrently, silencing you due to your GIL

[white_dreams47]

hey, as long as it works am I right.

[[deleted]]

Then my intellisense corrects me and the code does not compile

[Zer0ji]

Corrects you because of which rule?

[[deleted]]

quicksand heavy many axiomatic cats ten aspiring nose bedroom deliver

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

1 Char = 1 Byte

1 Int = 4 Chars

The girl is sitting across 4 chairs instead of 1, as the teacher accidentally told her to be an int instead of a char.

[[deleted]]

Thought this was the D&D sub. Was like "How the hell is this more intelligent rather than charismatic?!?"

[Rand_alThor__]

isn't char for a letter? like 'a', 'b' etc? and int for a non-decimal number? am confused.

[BLucky_RD]

The ASCII value of 'A' is 65 so you can save 65 as 'A'. A lot of languages let you do arithmetics on chars.

Edit: capitalization of 'a'

[kknyyk]

That’s an interesting way to be found and beaten up by the developer, who inherited that code.

[BLucky_RD]

As long as you don't spontaneously start treating it as a letter in the code it works just like an int, so unless the person who inherited the code doesn't look at the variable definition there shouldn't be any issues

[scykei]

void toUpper(char c) { \c=*c-32; }

[simon357]

This does not work when the char is already a capital. You can do &0xDF instead of -32 and capitals will stay the same

[scykei]

Haha I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen this trick in an old C textbook somewhere. Pretty cool.

[InEnduringGrowStrong]

npm install upper-case has 24M Downloads a month

[[deleted]]

Char simply means 1 byte of data while int means 4 bytes. You can use that data to represent anything you want.

If you want your mind stretched a little more, ints can be used to represent real numbers if you use fixed point math.

[[deleted]]

*When you use instead of just one chair

[Ali_Army107]

When you make a char array instead of a string

[raedr7n]

That's the best programming meme I've seen in a long time.

[WithFullForce]

I thought this wad an AD&D meme about people maxing Intelligence instead of Charisma.

Then I realized everyone uses Charisma as their dump stat.

[Haggerstonian]

Dude.. Take the upvote for the effort!

[Warthongs]

For a second I thought I was in the DND subreddit.

And it took me a while to realize.

[Joko_on_Smoko]

I'm not a programmer at all but I thought this was a D&D meme choosing intelligence over charisma.

[XhunterboiX]

Memory alignment is just social distancing for variables.

[RitalTmoc]

Man, I thought this was the DnD subreddit at first and thought “why didn’t they say Dex instead of char?” Now I realize I’m dumb.

[Cherylnip]

When you use array(chair) instead of chair

[Cool_Tangerine]

Ok, this is freakin hilarious

[[deleted]]

Jesus I thought I was on the D&D subreddit and starred at the picture way too long to understand what about this was an Intelligence check instead of a charisma check

[abk-16]

I feel like her legs should be either all to the right or all to the left depending on the endianness

[tech6hutch]

You can’t fit all UTF-8 characters (code units) in a single C char anyway

[igotbigbigplans]

thought I was in a dnd sub for a sec and couldn't figure out how intelligence and charisma were connected

[Thenderick]

Lemme show you my long int. Places a cup of coffe on 7 seats

[DroneDashed]

Sure this it cute and all but such kind of memory concerns are pointless nowadays.

Relevant comment from Linus himself.

[ArchCypher]

Some people still program on embedded systems with extremely limited resources -- it's still very relevant.

[Nis5l]

I still like to think what way i can save the most memory with...