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Cache-Conscious Structure Layout

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Esoteric programming language

An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language (particularly functional programming or procedural programming languages), or as a joke. The use of the word esoteric distinguishes them from languages that working developers use to write software.

Call stack

In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. This kind of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to just "the stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software, the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages.

C (programming language)

C (pronounced 'siː – like the letter c) is a general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.

Opaque pointer

In computer programming, an opaque pointer is a special case of an opaque data type, a data type declared to be a pointer to a record or data structure of some unspecified type. Opaque pointers are present in several programming languages including Ada, C, C++, D and Modula-2. If the language is strongly typed, programs and procedures that have no other information about an opaque pointer type T can still declare variables, arrays, and record fields of type T, assign values of that type, and compare those values for equality.

Computer memory

Computer memory stores information, such as data and programs for immediate use in the computer. The term memory is often synonymous with the term primary storage or main memory. An archaic synonym for memory is store. Computer memory operates at a high speed compared to storage which is slower but less expensive and higher in capacity. Besides storing opened programs, computer memory serves as disk cache and write buffer to improve both reading and writing performance.

Bus snooping

Bus snooping or bus sniffing is a scheme by which a coherency controller (snooper) in a cache (a snoopy cache) monitors or snoops the bus transactions, and its goal is to maintain a cache coherency in distributed shared memory systems. This scheme was introduced by Ravishankar and Goodman in 1983, under the name "write-once" cache coherency. A cache containing a coherency controller (snooper) is called a snoopy cache.

Return-oriented programming

Return-oriented programming (ROP) is a computer security exploit technique that allows an attacker to execute code in the presence of security defenses such as executable space protection and code signing. In this technique, an attacker gains control of the call stack to hijack program control flow and then executes carefully chosen machine instruction sequences that are already present in the machine's memory, called "gadgets". Each gadget typically ends in a return instruction and is located in a subroutine within the existing program and/or shared library code.

Page cache

In computing, a page cache, sometimes also called disk cache, is a transparent cache for the pages originating from a secondary storage device such as a hard disk drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). The operating system keeps a page cache in otherwise unused portions of the main memory (RAM), resulting in quicker access to the contents of cached pages and overall performance improvements. A page cache is implemented in kernels with the paging memory management, and is mostly transparent to applications.

Cyclone (programming language)

The Cyclone programming language is intended to be a safe dialect of the C language. Cyclone is designed to avoid buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities that are possible in C programs, without losing the power and convenience of C as a tool for system programming. Cyclone development was started as a joint project of AT&T Labs Research and Greg Morrisett's group at Cornell University in 2001. Version 1.0 was released on May 8, 2006. Cyclone attempts to avoid some of the common pitfalls of C, while still maintaining its look and performance.

Thrashing (computer science)

In computer science, thrashing occurs in a system with virtual memory when a computer's real storage resources are overcommitted, leading to a constant state of paging and page faults, slowing most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse. The situation can continue indefinitely until either the user closes some running applications or the active processes free up additional virtual memory resources.