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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.




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