Developing and Porting C and C++ Applications on AIX

4.2. Memory allocators

There are several internal mechanisms, called memory allocators, in the malloc subsystem on AIX. Each memory allocator implements a different memory allocation policy. The allocation policy refers to a set of data structures and algorithms to represent the heap and to implement allocation, deallocation, and reallocation.

The malloc subsystem on AIX supports the following memory allocators:

• 3.1 memory allocator

• Default memory allocator

• Default memory allocator with the malloc buckets extension

• Debug memory allocator

It is also supported to implement the user-defined memory allocator on AIX (see 4.2.5, “User-defined malloc replacement” on page 178).

The programming interface to the malloc subsystem is the same regardless of ...