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Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) 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.
Such blocks are used to store data objects or arrays of objects. Most structured and object-oriented languages provide an area of memory, called the heap or free store, from which objects are dynamically allocated. The example C code below illustrates how structure objects are dynamically allocated and referenced.
A simple memory pool module can allocate, for example, three pools at compile time with block sizes optimized for the application deploying the module. The application can allocate, access and free memory through the following interface: Allocate memory from the pools. The function will determine the pool where the required block fits in.
When a program is run, memory is often dynamically allocated in two places: the stack and the heap. Memory is continuously allocated on a stack but not on a heap, thus reflective of their names. Stack also refers to a programming construct, thus to differentiate it, this stack is referred to as the program's function call stack. Technically ...
Catastrophic failure of the dynamic memory management system may result when an object's backing memory is deleted out from under it more than once; an object is explicitly destroyed more than once; when, while using a pointer to manipulate an object not allocated on the free store, a programmer attempts to release said pointer's target object ...
In object-oriented programming, a destructor (sometimes abbreviated dtor [1]) is a method which is invoked mechanically just before the memory of the object is released. [2] It can happen when its lifetime is bound to scope and the execution leaves the scope, when it is embedded in another object whose lifetime ends, or when it was allocated dynamically and is released explicitly.
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. Memory allocators using region-based managements are often called area allocators , and when they work by only "bumping" a single pointer, as bump allocators .
Memory space with the size of an unsigned pointer is commonly used for this task, meaning that 32 or 64 bits of reference count storage must be allocated for each object. On some systems, it may be possible to mitigate this overhead by using a tagged pointer to store the reference count in unused areas of the object's memory.