You know what’s really missing in debuggers/software engineering in general?

Something akin to pic related, fluorescence microscopy. So you can mark the data and see exactly where it is at any point in the timeline. Is it really in the cache? I am sick and tired of the phrase “increase the chance of caching”. I want to know if it’s really there. The OS should be able to tell me this.

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Not even OS knows that.

it doesn't matter wether it's there or not, that information wouldn't be portable anyways as it depends on the amount of cache and what other processes are running. all that matters is that your data is more compact in memory so more of it will fit in the cache and you'll get less cache misses, and you can inspect that just fine with regular debugging tools

People like you hold tech back

Wrong. A cache line is only 64 bytes. That’s how much the cpu gets from main memory at a time. While you might get the next thing you need, you’re still not getting enough data unless the cpu can predict what you need next easily enough to cache it in advance. While memory contiguity is a necessary consequence of using arrays, it’s not TECHNICALLY the reason or why you use arrays. It’s because iterating over an array, yes you will grab the next element if your elements are less than 64 bytes, but the REAL reason is that going 1 by 1 over an array is such a predictable memory access pattern that your CPU isn’t too dumb to start getting the cache lines in advance, which is impossible with any pointer based data structure where it just has to follow the pointers and has no idea what it’s gonna find

Simply having things next to eachother isn’t going to work, cache lines aren’t so big that they’re gonna grab everything just because someone declares two big structures at the same time. It’s the memory access pattern that matters

i dont know shit bout debugging but picrel might be similar to what you mean? its called .cantor.dust.
i also found another thing similar to this but cant remember the name

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Even a completely contiguous linked list is going to be trash on the cache. Your CPU simply cannot know what to cache next, until it has read the pointer from the element you’re currently getting. As soon as you move off one cache line, you have to wait, because the cpu can’t know to cache the entire linked list, whereas that’s exactly what compiler tells the cpu to start doing if you tell the compiler you want to iterate over everything in an array

There are no instructions to tell the CPU to cache something, it decides that entirely on its own.

Explain in laymen terms

go fuck yourself