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Concept
Region-based memory management
Summary
In computer science, region-based memory management is a type of memory management in which each allocated object is assigned to a region. A region, also called a zone, arena, area, or memory context, is a collection of allocated objects that can be efficiently reallocated or deallocated all at once. Like stack allocation, regions facilitate allocation and deallocation of memory with low overhead; but they are more flexible, allowing objects to live longer than the stack frame in which they were allocated. In typical implementations, all objects in a region are allocated in a single contiguous range of memory addresses, similarly to how stack frames are typically allocated.
As a simple example, consider the following C code which allocates and then deallocates a linked list data structure:
Region *r = createRegion();
ListNode *head = NULL;
for (int i = 1; i next = head;
head = newNode;
}
// ...
// (use list here)
// ...
destroyRegion(r);
Although it required many operations to construct the linked list, it can be quickly deallocated in a single operation by destroying the region in which the nodes were allocated. There is no need to traverse the list.
Simple explicit regions are straightforward to implement; the following description is based on the work of Hanson. Each region is implemented as a linked list of large blocks of memory; each block should be large enough to serve many allocations. The current block maintains a pointer to the next free position in the block, and if the block is filled, a new one is allocated and added to the list. When the region is deallocated, the next-free-position pointer is reset to the beginning of the first block, and the list of blocks can be reused for the next allocated region. Alternatively, when a region is deallocated, its list of blocks can be appended to a global freelist from which other regions may later allocate new blocks. With either case of this simple scheme, it is not possible to deallocate individual objects in regions.
Official source
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