Memory Management with Explicit Regions

Much research has been devoted to studies of and algo-rithms for memory management based on garbage col-lection or explicit allocation and deallocation. An al-ternative approach, region-based memory management, has been known for decades, but has not been well-studied. In a region-based system each allocation spec-i es a region, and memory is reclaimed by destroying a region, freeing all the storage allocated therein. We show that on a suite of allocation-intensive C programs, regions are competitive with malloc/free and sometimes substantially faster. We also show that regions sup-port safe memory management with low overhead. Ex-perience with our benchmarks suggests that modifying many existing programs to use regions is not dicult.