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Implementing Malloc: Students and Systems Programming

Authors:

Brian P. Railing,

Randal E. BryantAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Pages 104 - 109

https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159597

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

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Abstract

This work describes our experience in revising one of the major programming assignments for the second-year course Introduction to Computer Systems, in which students implement a version of the malloc memory allocator. The revisions involved fully supporting a 64-bit address space, promoting a more modern programming style, and creating a set of benchmarks and grading standards that provide an appropriate level of challenge. With this revised assignment, students were able to implement more sophisticated allocators than they had in the past, and they also achieved higher performance on the related questions on the final exam.

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Cited By

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Kirdani-Ryan MKo AMerkle LDoyle MSheard JSoh LDorn B(2022)The House of Computing: Integrating Counternarratives into Computer Systems EducationProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499394(279-285)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478431.3499394

Index Terms

Implementing Malloc: Students and Systems Programming
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management

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Information

Published In

SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 2018

1174 pages

ISBN:9781450351034

DOI:10.1145/3159450

General Chairs:
Tiffany Barnes
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Daniel Garcia
University of California, Berkeley, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Elizabeth K. Hawthorne
Union County College, USA
,
Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones
UNC Charlotte, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 21 February 2018

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National Science Foundation

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SIGCSE '18

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SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 21 - 24, 2018

Maryland, Baltimore, USA

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SIGCSE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 459 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

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Kirdani-Ryan MKo AMerkle LDoyle MSheard JSoh LDorn B(2022)The House of Computing: Integrating Counternarratives into Computer Systems EducationProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499394(279-285)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478431.3499394

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McRT-Malloc: a scalable transactional memory allocator

SuperMalloc: a super fast multithreaded malloc for 64-bit machines

SuperMalloc: a super fast multithreaded malloc for 64-bit machines