Re: Heap memory issues for Embedded Systems

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 09:42:51PM -0300, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> > For an allocated block, the overhead should be exactly four bytes 
> > --- the size of the block, and depending on your application you might not 
> > need that (if the app keeps track of the size of blocks itself, for example). 
> 
> Lua does keep track of block sizes.

I think most C++ allocators take advantage of that; it's one reason C++
allocators can be much more efficient than C malloc/free.  They don't
support realloc, though.

I wonder if it'd be a win, for allocation speed and memory fragmentation,
if Lua could be convinced to hook into C++-style allocation through callbacks.
I havn't profiled memory use or allocation counts recently in my code to see
if it's relevant, and I don't know enough about Lua to know if it makes a lot
of small allocations.

-- 
Glenn Maynard