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shaafiee
shaafiee

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WASM: Memory Management

So you have chosen to write your new web app in WASM - exciting! On top of that, you want to write it in C++ to have fine-grained control over data storage and manipulation.

Here's some great advice that will help you overcome serious headaches.

Firstly, because the memory available to your program is actually a JS object, it is available as one contiguous chunk that is limited to linear scaling. This means that you have to be very careful about deleting objects and freeing memory. In fact, stop deleting objects altogether. If you feel the need to get rid of temporary memory objects then create a separate temporary memory object within JS for that operation, like so:

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The second big hint is, align your data structures. When you have lots of data structures that go in and out of the execution scope, you will run into lots of segmentation faults due to memory misalignments, particularly if your structures have many levels of invariably scaling sub-structures, such as in the case of Markov chains.

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Explicit memory alignment will have penalties in terms of growth of memory as your Markov chains' complexities increase - this is where multiple memory objects come in handy. This drawback is worth the performance and stability bonuses, which you will learn as you dig into WASM.

Have fun in your WASM journey!

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