On 2/17/19 6:41 PM, William F Pokorny wrote:

> 
> OK. Surprised the heap allocation is slower than one on the stack. I
> figured the allocation and free mechanisms were more or less the same -
> just being a difference of where in memory it happened. Guess not?

The compiler figures out how much stack space a function call needs, and
allocating that memory is simply a matter of moving the stack pointer
*once*, a single register operation, upon entry to a function.

Heap requires a separate function call for each object to be allocated.
That function examines its tables trying to find a "best fit" for the
size requested, mark those tables as allocated, and return a pointer.
For the reverse, free'ing tries to merge freed memory [1].  Much, much
more expensive than stack.

[1] Old MS-DOS systems you could kill it by allocating all of memory as
1KB blocks, free all those blocks, then try to allocate a 2KB block. Out
of memory.

> 
> Also surprised allocations on the stack have to be of fixed size. Is it
> so on the function call just one allocation can happen on the stack for
> all the dynamic variables in the function?

See above.

-- 
dik
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