Sp.h, a new C library, makes one assertion before anything else: there is no heap. The types that underpin it — allocator functions, explicit memory ownership — exist to force programs to accept that “the ability to allocate any amount of memory from the ether” is a fiction. The runtime doesn’t own memory. Your program does. C’s standard library tells a different story: call malloc, the heap provides. Build on that story long enough and you get programs that leak, fragment, and run slowly, because the premise was wrong, not the programmer. The fiction of abundance produced architectures that depend on abundance.
Microsoft, this week, began canceling Claude Code licenses for thousands of employees. Six months ago they’d encouraged everyone — engineers, project managers, designers — to use as much AI coding assistance as they wanted. Usage scaled. So did the bill. At enterprise scale, token-based inference costs more per unit of work than human labor. The assumption that AI is cheap and humans are expensive inverted under load. The architecture the company started building around abundant cheap compute turned out more expensive than what it replaced.
The heap and the token share a premise: the resource is effectively free, so the architecture can treat it as unlimited. The architecture built on that fiction is fragile to its own success. The more the program allocates, the slower it gets. The more the organization automates, the higher the bill. Both fail at the premise. The thing from the ether was never free.