[Mono-devel-list] malloc and free on CLI

[Jeyasankar Kottalam]

Hello,

I'm the student writing GCC-CIL for Mono as part of Google's Summer of Code.

How should I implement malloc and free on CLI? I've come up with a couple of
ideas, but none of them seem particularly good to me:

- P/Invoke to native malloc and free

  Problem: The binary becomes tied to the details of the underlying platform to
pull in a malloc from the appropriate library. Binary portability is lost.

- Writing a custom "allocator" in C# etc. This would be great if it's possible
to get a block of raw memory and tell the garbage collector not to move it.
Then it would be a simple matter of deleting the reference to the block when
free() is called, and the garbage collector would pick it up whenever.

  Problem: I don't think we can get a chunk of raw memory from the runtime.
Seems like the best we could do is "new byte[foo]" which gives an _array
object_. Also I don't know of any mechanism to keep the block from being
shuffled around in memory by the garbage collector.

- The mysterious "localloc" instruction.

  Problem: I think it is completly unrelated to malloc(), so never mind.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Sorry if I'm using the wrong
terminology, I'm new to both CIL and C#.

Thanks,
-Jey Kottalam