Memory management#

Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Allocators#

• mimalloc: A compact general purpose allocator with excellent performance

Approaches#

• Garbage collection
  • Reference counting
  • Tracing garbage collection
• Manual memory management
• Region-based memory management
• Stack-based memory allocation

Techniques#

• Borrow checker
• Resource acquisition is initialization (RAII)

Issues#

• Fragmentation
• Memory leak
• Unreachable memory

Resources#

Text#

• [2023] A simple, arena-backed, generic dynamic array for C
• [2023] An easy-to-implement, arena-friendly hash map
• [2023] Arena allocator tips and tricks
• [2023] Memory Allocation
• [2022] mmap(1Tb): A Rust arena allocator (ab)using Linux overcommit
• [2022] Safety in Non-Memory-Safe Languages ⭐
• [2022] Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator ⭐
• [2021] Arenas in Rust
• [2019] Memory Management in Lobster

Video#

• [2022] Memory safety in C++, Zig, & Rust (Part 1)
• [2020] What’s a Memory Allocator Anyway? ⭐