This is important since in a schedule two appointments will have a gap between them if the intervals are open (2..4),(4..6) implies nothing scheduled at 4 or will overlap if tey are closed [2..4],[4..6] double booking at 4. The correct solution is to use mixed intervals e.g (2..4], (4..6] now the complete interval is covered but there is no overlap.

There are many other cases where this is an issue, in fact it is an issue for any grouped data from a continuous set. If we want temporal keys to be sound we would need a solution that caters for this.

Since malloc and sbrk are allocating VM, I think there should be a mechanism, that kindly signals processes to free memory, before getting into a severe OOM situation. Not as a reaction of acute memory demands, but a kernel process, that constantly monitors the system and every now and then nudges the processes.

A good criterion for that would be the ratio of a process allocated pages / pages recently accessed. For garbage collected, but also leaking processes this number may grow rather quickly. In the case of a process, which actually freed up memory in that situation, the kernel could give bonus points, not to kill it in OOM. It could also track statistics about the average of the additionally mapped pages during memory deallocation, the fewer the better.

Not so unique. You might be interested in the way R handles NULL value. It is fairly similar (even though many examples are not applicable). For instance:

> sum(NULL, 3)
[1] 3
> NULL + 3
numeric(0)

An additional new write-up with powerful points, I’ve been a lurker right here for a brief time but wish to get a lot far more engaged in the long term….