Memory management

Memory management is a fundamental aspect of programming. Gofra provides direct memory access operations for loading and storing data.

Critical notice

Currently, in gofra load and store operations works with always 8-bytes data, so this will cause some overwriting of memory layout, consider that while using critical to memory operations

Memory operations

Store into memory

Stores a value at a specified memory address.

Mnemonic: a b -> _ _

Intrinsic: !<

Consumes two values from the stack: [address, value]

• Stores value at memory location address
• Both values are removed from the stack

Syntax

<address> <value> !<

Examples

// Store to a variable
var name int
name 1 !<  // Store 1 into name

// Store to calculated address
var array int[10]
array 0 + 42 !<  // Store 42 at array[0]
array 8 + 99 !<  // Store 99 at array[8] (if int is 4 bytes)

Load from memory

Stores a value at a specified memory address.

Mnemonic: a -> b

Intrinsic: ?>

Consumes one value from the stack: [address]

• Loads the value from memory location address
• Pushes the loaded value onto the stack

Syntax

<address> ?>

Examples

// Load from a variable
var name int
name 1 !<    // Store 1 into name
name ?>      // Load value from name (pushes 1 onto stack)
print_integer   // Prints 1

// Load from array element
var numbers int[3]
numbers 0 + 10 !<    // numbers[0] = 10
numbers 8 + 20 !<    // numbers[1] = 20 (assuming 8-byte integers)
numbers 0 + ?> print // Load and print numbers[0]

Memory Size Considerations

• Pointer Width: Determined by CPU architecture (typically 32-bit or 64-bit)
• Word Size: Architecture-dependent, affects natural memory alignment
• Type Sizes: Different data types occupy different amounts of memory

Type size reference

var b char    // 1 byte
var i int     // 4 or 8 bytes (architecture-dependent)
var p *int     // 4 or 8 bytes (pointer width)