Composing High-Performance Memory Allocators

In this paper, we present a flexible and efficient infrastructure for building memory allocators that is based on C++ templates and inheritance. This novel approach allows programmers to build custom and general-purpose allocators as “heap layers” that can be composed without incurring any runtime overhead or additional programming cost. We show that this infrastructure simplifies allocator construction and results in allocators that either match or improve the performance of heavily-tuned allocators written in C, including the Kingsley allocator and the GNU obstack library. We further show this infrastructure can be used to rapidly build a general-purpose allocator that has performance comparable to Lea’s allocator, the best uniprocesor allocator of which we are aware. We thus demonstrate a clean, easy-to-use allocator interface that seamlessly combines the power and efficiency of any number of general and custom allocators within a single application.