vedangnaik / exmallib

My personal implementations of malloc, free, realloc, and calloc, on Linux.

exmallib: Exception's malloc library

Introduction

The exmallib library provides an interface to UnhandledException's personal implementations of malloc (exmalloc), free (exfree), realloc (exrealloc), and calloc (excalloc), along with a custom (albeit simple) heap allocator. exmalloc, exrealloc, and excalloc provide chunk-aligned memory blocks closest in size to the user's request, while reusing as much space as possible and dealing with memory fragmentation in the background.

Purpose

This library is the result of my quest to learn more about the internals of C and memory management on Linux systems. I suppose it could also be used as a starting point for the construction of memory allocators on other systems as well.

Usage

Simply add exmallib.h, exmallib.c, and helpers.c to your project! You could also separately compile these and link the library after the fact: see the Build section to see how.

Build

The code

cmake is required to build the code. Otherwise you can build it manually using gcc or any other C99+ compiler. With cmake, run the following commands to set up the build system:

git clone https://github.com/vedangnaik/exmallib.git
cd exmallib
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .

Run cmake --build .. directly after to build the code. The output file is placed in /build.

The docs

doxygen is required to build the documentation. Run the following commands from /exmallib to build it. The config file Doxyfile can be modified as per your requirements.

mkdir docs
doxygen Doxyfile