Memory Allocation: Either Love It or Hate It (or just think it’s okay)

Highlights

• Class starts with a thorough overview of classic allocation strategies
• Teaches what strategies are helpful and, equally importantly, what strategies are wasting programmer and CPU time
• Defines a modular allocator design that is easy to adapt to a variety of allocation patterns
• Gives practical advise on choosing a good allocator on various platforms

Attendee profile

C++ programmers with an interest in speed and size optimization stand to gain most from this class. Understanding of basic templates is necessary. A grasp of pointers and low-level object layout is helpful but will be thoroughly explained during the class. 

Outline

• Introduction
• Lies, damn lies...
  • Engineering and learning challenges
  • Capacity vs. generalization
  • Specific allocators: Windows 7, Linux, jemalloc
• Custom allocators
  • Temporal patterns
  • Size distribution
  • Regions
  • Free lists
• Policy-based implementation
  • General interface
  • Top allocator
  • Regions (in-situ vs. heap-segmented)
  • Free lists
  • Reaps
• Summary