C: region-based memory management

Question

I'm looking for detailed description of memory management mechanisms for C applications, especially region-based memory management. I can't find any good in-depth articles/books/tutorials about it :(

Could someone please point me to the right direction?

Answer 1

There is some information about APR's memory pools:

• A chapter from Version Control with Subversion book.
• A chapter from Inoue Seiichiro's libapr programming tutorial.
• Basic Resource Management in Apache: the APR Pools, a tutorial.
• API.

Another example is nginx's pools which is basically regions:

• ngx_palloc.h (65 sloc).
• ngx_palloc.c (311 sloc).

Answer 2

While not for C, I can say first handed that the implementation in the following paper is written in C, as a gcc-plugin. The paper here PDF is titled "Towards Region-Based Memory Management for Go." There are plenty of semantics and such to explain how the authors implement RBMM for the Go programming language.

Answer 3

Good reference is the original Doom source code (zone memory allocator, see here http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Zone_memory)

Further development is Quake1 source code (hunk/zone malloc).

Not a tutorial, but a very nice implementation.