Foreword
I have always been fascinated with how changes in hardware affect how we write software.
A couple of decades ago, memory was a very limited resource. It made sense back then for our software to take hold of some piece of memory and mutate it as necessary. However, allocating this memory and cleaning up after we no longer needed it was a very error-prone task. Some memory was never freed; sometimes memory was allocated over another structure, leading to faults. At the time, garbage collection was a known technique, but we needed faster CPUs in order to use it in our daily software and free ourselves from manual memory management. That has happened—most of our languages are now garbage-collected.
Today, a similar phenomenon is happening. ...
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