If anyone's curious, here's an old article about working with handles and the Macintosh memory manager: http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_02/Mem_Mg...

(The article's examples are in Pascal, the original language of choice for the Mac.)

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Update: wow, Apple still has bits of the original Inside Macintosh books available online. Here’s a section on the memory manager, replete with discussions of the “A5 world” and handle methods (MoveHHI, etc.) in Pascal: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...

Oh man, that brings back memories! Inside Macintosh. Pascal. …

The article got virtual memory wrong to a bit.. it got much better over the years and using relocatable handles fell by the wayside to more plain pointers.

I was using MPW C, writing with 68k for performance pinch points, and malloc() was much faster than NewHandle() - faster than NewPtr() too.

I guess there was some simple pre-allocated larger block that got parts handed out on demand. Not unlike a modern implementation.

I still miss MPW Shell.

Microsoft's Win16 memory allocator APIs (GlobalAlloc and LocalAlloc) also returned handles so the OS could move memory blocks to new addresses behind the scenes. Application code would need to call GlobalLock/Unlock APIs to acquire a temporary pointer to the memory block. The APIs still exist in Win32 and Win64 for backwards compatibility, but now they're thin wrappers around a more standard memory allocator.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/memory/compa...

Historically, I think there was an overlap of APIs between early Macintosh and early versions of Windows because Microsoft was porting their software.

Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) on November 19, 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history

I kinda miss the fun days of using addresses to physical memory. (Maybe I'm wrong but I've always assumed that explicit use of handles went out of fashion because virtual address lookup is, in effect, a handle.)

This was used to avoid memory fragmentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS_memory_manageme...