from pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to programming@programming.dev on 27 Sep 2023 10:39
https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/231147
Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation. With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime. With the core details of my own technique settled, now is a good time to document and share lessons learned. This is certainly not the only way to approach arena allocation, but these are practices I’ve worked out to simplify programs and reduce mistakes.
An arena is a memory buffer and an offset into that buffer, initially zero. To allocate an object, grab a pointer at the offset, advance the offset by the size of the object, and return the pointer. There’s a little more to it, such as ensuring alignment and availability. We’ll get to that. Objects are not freed individually. Instead, groups of allocations are freed at once by restoring the offset to an earlier value. Without individual lifetimes, you don’t need to write destructors, nor do your programs need to walk data structures at run time to take them apart. You also no longer need to worry about memory leaks.
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