rajamukherji / ramp

Raja's Attempt at a Memory Pool

Ramp

Raja's Attempt at a Memory Pool

About

ramp is a very simple library which provides a non-threadsafe memory pool. It is designed to be used in event based applications written in C, and allows memory to be allocated easily within an event and then freed automatically at the end of the event.

Each ramp_t object keeps track of a linked list of pages of memory, with the page size specified at ramp_t construction. Memory can be allocated from a ramp_t object using ramp_alloc.

Building

Building ramp requires rabs.

$ git clone https://github.com/rajamukherji/ramp
$ cd ramp
$ rabs

Usage

If the request block of memory is too big to fit into a single page, then an external block of memory is allocated, but still tracked within the ramp_t.

At the beginning of each handling each event, allocated a new ramp_t object by calling ramp_new(size_t PageSize). The PageSize argument to ramp_new sets the size of each new page.

ramp_t *Ramp = ramp_new(512);

During the event handling, any number of memory blocks can be allocated using ramp_alloc(ramp_t *Ramp, size_t Size).

char *Buffer = ramp_alloc(Ramp, 128);

Finally, after the event is handled, all of the memory allocated with the ramp_t instance can be freed using ramp_clear(ramp_t *Ramp).

ramp_clear(Ramp);

If additional cleanup is required when ramp_clear() is called, ramp_defer(ramp_t *Ramp, size_t Size, void (*CleanupFn)(void *)) can be used instead of ramp_alloc(). CleanupFn() will be called with the returned pointer when ramp_clear() is called.

void object_cleanup(struct object_t *Object) {
	// clean up code
}

struct object_t *Object = (object_t *)ramp_defer(Ramp, sizeof(object_t), object_cleanup);

The ramp_t instance can be reused if required. When the ramp_t instance is no longer required, it can be freed with ramp_free(ramp_t *Ramp).

ramp_free(Ramp);