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12.3.5 Binding Time
As we have just seen, operating systems use various kinds of names to refer to objects. Sometimes the mapping between a name and an object is fixed, but sometimes it is not. In the latter case, it may matter when the name is bound to the object. In general, early binding is simple, but is not flexible, whereas late binding is more complicated but often more flexible.
To clarify the concept of binding time, let us look at some real-world examples. An example of early binding is the practice of some colleges to allow parents to enroll a baby at birth and prepay the current tuition. When the student shows up 18 years later, the tuition is fully paid up, no matter how high it may be at that moment.
In manufacturing, ordering parts in advance and maintaining an inventory of them is early binding. In contrast, just-in-time manufacturing requires suppliers to be able to provide parts on the spot, with no advance notice required. This is late binding.
Programming languages often support multiple binding times for variables. Global variables are bound to a particular virtual address by the compiler. This exemplifies early binding. Variables local to a procedure are assigned a virtual address (on the stack) at the time the procedure is invoked. This is intermediate binding. Variables stored on the heap (those allocated by malloc in C or new in Java) are assigned virtual addresses only at the time they are actually used. Here we have late binding.
Operating systems often use early binding for most data structures, but occasionally use late binding for flexibility. Memory allocation is a case in point. Early multiprogramming systems on machines lacking address relocation hardware had to load a program at some memory address and relocate it to run there. If it was ever swapped out, it had to be brought back at the same memory address or it would fail. In contrast, paged virtual memory is a form of late binding. The actual physical address corresponding to a given virtual address is not known until the page is touched and actually brought into memory.
Another example of late binding is window placement in a GUI. In contrast to the early graphical systems, in which the programmer had to specify the absolute screen coordinates for all images on the screen, in modern GUIs, the software uses coordinates relative to the window's origin, but that is not determined until the window is put on the screen, and it may even be changed later.