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Welcome to Memory Management

Understanding how your software runs on hardware is important for writing fast, performant code. In this course we'll be talking all about one of the main aspects of software performance: memory management.

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Goals of This Course

Understand how and where programs store data in memory. Variables, functions and objects don't get to exist for free. Where do they live as your code runs?
Learn how to make programs more efficient. Most performance related problems in backend software are memory related (at least in my experience). Learn how it all works so you can troubleshoot and optimize.
Practice programming in a lower-level language. C gets you much closer to the hardware than Python, JavaScript, or Go. By writing C, you'll learn a lot about how software works closer to the metal.
Learn about garbage collection (and build your own). You will likely work in a garbage collected language at some point, whether that's Python, Go, JavaScript or something else. Best to understand what trade-offs are being made.

This is not a C course. We will be writing C code, and we'll cover the basics of C that you'll need, but we're focusing on memory, not C.

Prerequisites

Coding experience: You should be comfortable writing code in at least one other language, like Python, JavaScript, or Go.
CS Basics: We expect that you understand basic algorithms, data structures, OOP and FP concepts.

Building Sneklang

If you're familiar with super high-level languages, you're probably used to not thinking about memory. In this course, we'll be building the "Sneklang" programming language (okay just little parts of it) in C. We will study all about manually managing memory in C, and toward the end of the course, we'll build a simple garbage collector so that Sneklang devs don't have to think too hard.

A small bit of irony here is that C was originally considered a "high-level" language when it was released. And in fact, in some ways, it still is. Modern compilers & hardware are incredibly cool and make impressive optimizations. But even so, I think there is a lot we can learn together on our Sneklang journey 😃

Assignment

The ultimate crime has been committed. Someone's confused "Python" with "Sneklang".

Update the code to print:

Starting the Sneklang interpreter...

Make sure to keep the \n newline character at the end of the print statement.