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Document number: N3537

Date: 2013-03-12

Clarifying Memory Allocation

by Lawrence Crowl and Chandler Carruth

Excerpt:

The allocation and deallocation of memory has become a significant expense in modern systems. ...

An essential requirement on implementations is that they deliver usable memory, not that they have a particular sequence of calls. We propose to explicitly decouple the implementation calls from the abstract calls. ... Together these changes enable implementations to reduce the number of malloc calls by avoiding them or fusing them. However, it would only enable fusing mallocs together into larger mallocs provided it can prove that both mallocs have overlapping lifetimes (ended by corresponding calls to free) such that the peak allocated memory of the program remains unchanged.