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How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
It's a masterclass in engineering under constraints: how to analyze a problem from first principles, leverage mathematical insights, and design elegant solutions that work within strict resource limits. In the paper, Douglas mentions that even though the false positive rate was acceptable, in the wild, they were encountering a lot of new words that needed to be added to the dictionary. As a result, Douglas looked for alternate data structure designs to be able to fit a dictionary of 30,000 words in memory with similar lookup performance and accuracy.
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