Get an overview of the memory management techniques that are available to Linux™ programmers, focusing on the C language but applicable to other languages as well. This article gives you the details of how memory management works, and then goes on to show how to manage memory manually, how to manage memory semi-manually using referencing counting or pooling, and how to manage memory automatically using garbage collection.
Memory management is one of the most fundamental areas of computer programming. In many scripting languages, you don’t have to worry about how memory is managed, but that doesn’t make memory management any less important. Knowing the abilities and limitations of your memory manager is critical for effective programming. In most systems languages like C and C++, you have to do memory management. This article covers the basics of manual, semi-automatic, and automatic memory management practices.
Back in the days of assembly language programming on the Apple II, memory management was not a huge concern. You basically had run of the whole system. Whatever memory the system had, so did you. You didn’t even have to worry about figuring out how much memory it had, since every computer had the same amount. So, if your memory requirements were pretty static, you just chose a memory range to use and used it.
Links: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-memory/
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