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Monday, November 26, 2012

Answering a begging question... what does the heap look like?

So I was curious. What does a process' heap look like? If I were to take a hint from conservative garbage collectors, and scan the memory of a process, what would it look like? Well, to answer this, I threw together some software here, and ran a few GNU programs to see what they look like. I then try to relate memory allocation calls with the heap layout. The conservative garbage collector hint I used was merely the following. When my tool scans the heap, address by address, if the value at each address looks like another address residing in the heap, then my tool says the heap address points to the other address. Anyways the results are munged to crap out a .dot file. More details and such are here.

-Matt

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