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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.
It is also said that a pointer points to a datum [in memory] when the pointer's value is the datum's memory address. More generally, a pointer is a kind of reference, and it is said that a pointer references a datum stored somewhere in memory; to obtain that datum is to dereference the pointer. The feature that separates pointers from other ...
In operating systems, memory management is the function responsible for managing the computer's primary memory. [1]: 105–208 The memory management function keeps track of the status of each memory location, either allocated or free. It determines how memory is allocated among competing processes, deciding which gets memory, when they receive ...
Due to the rules governing memory allocation, more computer memory is sometimes allocated than is needed. For example, memory can only be provided to programs in chunks (usually a multiple of 4 bytes), and as a result if a program requests perhaps 29 bytes, it will actually get a chunk of 32 bytes. When this happens, the excess memory goes to ...
Stop-and-copy garbage collection in a Lisp architecture: [1] Memory is divided into working and free memory; new objects are allocated in the former. When it is full (depicted), garbage collection is performed: All data structures still in use are located by pointer tracing and copied into consecutive locations in free memory.
A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a memory cache that stores the recent translations of virtual memory to physical memory. It is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. [1] It can be called an address-translation cache. It is a part of the chip's memory-management unit (MMU).
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.
The C programming language manages memory statically, automatically, or dynamically.Static-duration variables are allocated in main memory, usually along with the executable code of the program, and persist for the lifetime of the program; automatic-duration variables are allocated on the stack and come and go as functions are called and return.