How free42's memory works?

[brouhaha]

(03-20-2023 04:11 AM)slabco Wrote:  Who can tell the machanics?

With Free42, the memory is managed by the C++ runtime system, so when memory has to be allocated by the calculator, it may be allocated from memory that the operating system (Windows MacOS, Linux, Android, etc.) has already given to the runtime system, or the runtime system may ask the operating system for more. In the latter case, usually more than is immediately needed is given by the operating system to the runtime system, hence an allocation can actually cause free memory (within the application) to go up.

Quote:How many memory of free42's can be used safely?

There's no easy way to tell. Free42 on a computer/phone/tablet works nothing at all like the HP-42S, which had exactly 8192 bytes of RAM (unless you cracked it open and put in more). The HP-42S fimrware managed it very closely, and always knew exactly how much unused RAM was present.

Unfortunately, wanting to know this for Free42 is sort of like wanting to know how many pages you can type into Microsoft Word, or how many tabs you can open in your web browser. At some point you'll hit a limit, but it's difficult to predict where that limit would be.

Probably before you hit the absolute limit, the performance of your computer/phone/tablet will start to suffer.