Summary: Memory Management with Explicit Regions
David Gay \Lambda and Alex Aiken \Lambda
EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
fdgay,aikeng@cs.berkeley.edu
Abstract
Much research has been devoted to studies of and algo­
rithms for memory management based on garbage col­
lection or explicit allocation and deallocation. An al­
ternative approach, region­based memory management,
has been known for decades, but has not been well­
studied. In a region­based system each allocation spec­
ifies a region, and memory is reclaimed by destroying
a region, freeing all the storage allocated therein. We
show that on a suite of allocation­intensive C programs,
regions are competitive with malloc/free and sometimes
substantially faster. We also show that regions sup­
port safe memory management with low overhead. Ex­
perience with our benchmarks suggests that modifying
many existing programs to use regions is not difficult.

Source: Aiken, Alex - Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences