Abstract

Introduction Dynamic memory allocation is an integral part of programming. Programs in C and C++ (via constructors and destructors) routinely allocate memory using the familiar ANSI-C standard interface malloc established around 1979 by Doug McIlroy. Malloc manipulates heap memory using the functions malloc(s) to allocate a block of size s, free(b) to free a previously allocated block b, and realloc(b,s) to resize a block b to size s. No optimal solution to dynamic memory allocation exists [1, 2, 3] so, over the years, many malloc implementations were proposed with different tradeoffs in time and space efficiency. A study by David Korn and Phong Vo in 1985 presented and compared 11 malloc versions. Only a few of these survived the test of time. The first widely used malloc was written by McIlroy and became part of many Bell Labs Research and System V versions of the UNIX system. This malloc is based on a first-fit strategy and can be significantly slow in large memories. C. King

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