MEMORY MANAGEMENT WITH EXPLICIT REGIONS

Much research has been devoted to studies of and algorithms for memory management based on garbage collection or explicit allocation and dea llocation. An alternative approach, region-based memory management, ha s been known for decades, but has not been well-studied. In a region-b ased system each allocation specifies a region, and memory is reclaime d by destroying a region, freeing all the storage allocated therein. W e show that on a suite of allocation-intensive C programs, regions are competitive with malloc/free and sometimes substantially faster. We a lso show that regions support safe memory management with low overhead . Experience with our benchmarks suggests that modifying many existing programs to use regions is not difficult.