Justin has left a new comment on your post "Memory Management in PIRC":
That's one way to do it. Why not the APR way of things? Creating memory pools in which memory can only be allocated (not freed) and after each step is finished you simpy reclaim the entire pool (no fragmentation, no pointer tracking and they even use it to keep track of filedescriptors). Another trick would be to simply allocate sizeof(void*) in each allocation and use that to build a single-linked-list (NULL marks the end). This keeps you from having to allocate additional pointer blocks and it's more CPU cache friendly (since you will only need to access the last memory allocation (probably cache-hot) and the new allocation (which will probably be needed soon). But these are just simple alternatives and I haven't dug in to see whether there are other reasons for not using these schemes. Or having looked at the implementation at all for that matter, just my $0.02 ;-) Posted by Justin to Parrot at November 30, 2008 4:11 AM
