memory allocation

[Dr. T. Andrews]

In article <33692 at XAIT.XEROX.COM>, g-rh at XAIT.XEROX.COM (Richard Harter) writes:
) 	Immediate coalescence is usually the right thing to do.  Your
) strategy for validating freed blocks sounds like it is expensive time
) wise.  

Not really.  As I scan and coalesce the blocks, I perform the
validation.  of the pointers.  It's real simple (one "xor"),
but catches most errors.  The control block contains only:
	[0]	back ptr
	[1]	size of block (is even, the low bit == "in use")
	[2]	[0] ^ [1]

I don't mind the small expense at free() time, because in general
that's not done nearly as often as malloc() in my applications.
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