Last week I explained what a memory pool is and how to use it. This week my lesson was about implementing a simple memory pool capable of fixed size memory chunk allocations. The pool preallocates a block of memory on demand, carves out equal sized chunks from it, and returns a raw pointer each time you call
pool.malloc().
Memory chunks are described using a simple
struct chunk_t and stored in a singly-linked-list; the struct has an internal anonymous
union for size optimization: the same memory region can either represent the next pointer of the list’s node or hold user data.
P.S. Watch in HD, though I did increased the font size per your requests 🙂
Code from the class:
lesson_memory_pool_how_to.cpp
Cleaned up implementation:
memory_pool.hpp | memory_pool.cpp