Memory management for high-performance applications

摘要: Memory management is one of the most enduring problems in computer science. The first papers on the subject appeared in the early sixties. Wilson’s memory management survey papers from the nineties include over 220 citations [86, 87], and the subject remains an area of active research. Much current research on memory management focuses on automatic storage allocation (garbage collection). While garbage collection represents a software engineering advance over explicit storage allocation, the performance of garbage-collected languages (like Java) continues to lag behind those that use explicit memory management (like C and C++)[25, 59, 82]. Because we are concerned here with high-performance applications, we will focus exclusively on explicit memory management (which we hereafter refer to simply as “memory management” or “memory allocation”).