[heinrichhartman]

While we are here, does anyone have a good resource about memory management strategies in C?

Topics:

* Best practices for C function signatures (caller allocates (which size?), callee allocates (where? which allocator?))

* Memory Ownership Models

* Borrowing

* Reference Counting

* Garbage Collectors and C-Libraries providing this functionality

* Interning Objects (Strings)

* RAII [1]? And it's benefits/flaws

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initia...

Context: I feel that understanding the C memory primitives in not that hard (stack variables, malloc/free, C++'s new). But how to use them is devilishly tricky. I have seen little information about this.

[flohofwoe]

Shameless plug:

This generally discusses the lack of RAII in C (towards the end), and what to do about it:

https://floooh.github.io/2019/09/27/modern-c-for-cpp-peeps.h...

...and this presents a (reasonably runtime-safe) general memory management strategy using tagged-index-handles instead of pointers:

https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html

The gist is basically:

- don't allocate small chunks of memory all over the code base, instead move memory management into few centralized systems, and let those systems own all memory they allocate

- don't use pointers as public "object references", instead use "tagged index handles"

- don't use "owning pointers" at all, use pointers only as short-lived "immutable borrow references"

[ngcc_hk]

Another global (imperative style) vs object (code and data by object) vs functional ...

[heinrichhartman]

Thanks for this!