MLib Alpha 1 API Reference

Memory Pools

an MLib memory pool is a fast memory allocator for fixed-size blocks.

note that the reason why memory pools are so fast is due to two facts: first, blocks are allocated in batches from the heap. Second, once allocated, a block will never be released to the heap until the pool itself is destroyed.

never forget that modern implementations of the standard "malloc" and "free" functions are already very fast. Using memory pools is really handy when you want to absolutely reduce fragmentation, and need to perform _lots_ of consecutive allocs and frees..

the MLib uses memory pools to manage list nodes, hash nodes, tree nodes and other frequently used fixed-sized objects..

M_MemoryPool


  typedef struct M_MemoryPoolRec_*   M_MemoryPool;

handle to a memory pool object. A memory pool is used to allocate and release memory blocks of the same size extremely rapidly. This is useful to manage things like list nodes, hash nodes, etc..

m_memory_pool_find


  MLIB_API(M_MemoryPool)
  m_memory_pool_find( M_Memory  memory,
                      M_Size    element_size );

find a memory pool that stores memory blocks of a given size

input

memory	memory manager handle
element_size	element size for the memory pool

return

memory pool handle, can be NULL

m_memory_pool_alloc


  MLIB_API(M_Pointer)
  m_memory_pool_alloc( M_MemoryPool  pool,
                       M_Size        size );

allocate a block from a given memory pool

intput

pool	memory pool handle
size	size of memory block. this parameter is only used for debugging purpose, and must _match_ the value used to create or find the memory pool (e.g. the "element_size" parameter of the m_memory_pool_find call used to retrieve the memory pool handle).

return

new block (it is not zero-filled !!)

m_memory_pool_free


  MLIB_API(void)
  m_memory_pool_free( M_Pointer     data,
                      M_MemoryPool  pool );

free a given memory block that was previously allocated with m_memory_pool_alloc .

intput

data	memory block address
pool	memory pool handle

generated on Tue Oct 09 23:59:46 2001