Actually I was asking myself the exact same thing after I read that the
GCC compiler uses this memory allocation strategy. If you google for
obstack you will find a lot of programs using the obstack libs.
From what I understand upon till now, and please correct me if I am wrong:
obstack is a data stack that is used to create pooled memory allocation.
Memory allocation and deallocation, is said to be much faster because it's
done a pool at a time. Error-handling pools can be preallocated so that
programs can make good recovery's if no more regular memory is available.
The lifespan of a memory pool can be crontrolled like the way the apache
webserver does e.g. `Apache Portable Runtime'.
For me personally I don't think I will use this strategy's because I
simply don't need it, but it is still interesting to look into it
because it requires me to actually think about how memory allocation works
and what the options are.
J. |
