Summary

In this chapter, we’ve discussed the most rudimentary forms of memory allocators. Such allocators exist everywhere, linked into every C program you write, as well as in the underlying OS which is managing memory for its own data structures. As with many systems, there are many trade-offs to be made in building such a system, and the more you know about the exact workload presented to an allocator, the more you could do to tune it to work better for that workload. Making a fast, space-efficient, scalable allocator that works well for a broad range of workloads remains an on-going challenge in modern computer systems.