Intel Threading Building Blocks

Replace malloc, free, realloc, and calloc

Four simple interfaces to allow for malloc, free, realloc, and calloc exist:

	#include "tbb\scalable_allocator.h"
	void * scalable_malloc (size_t size);
	void   scalable_free (void* ptr);
	void * scalable_realloc (void* ptr, size_t size);
	void * scalable_calloc (size_t nobj, size_t size);

These can be used to replace the C language malloc, free, realloc, and calloc memory functions by calling them instead. In general, that is the safest and easiest choice. Be sure that memory from scalable_malloc is freed using scalable_free, and memory from malloc is freed using free. Mixing these up can have results which are difficult to debug. Therefore, Threading Building Blocks does not attempt to replace malloc, free, realloc, and calloc for you. If you are diligent and make sure you are not maxing malloc/free and scalable_malloc/scalable_free (including if you use a module compiled to use the standard malloc to obtain objects you later free), you can also override the definitions using extern statements and macros. Code to do that is shown in Chapter 11 in Replacing malloc, calloc, realloc, and free (”Replacing malloc, calloc, realloc, and free”).

Note

You do not want to make malloc a call to scalable_allocator because scalable_malloc(n) returns a pointer with sufficient alignment for any type, whereas scalable_allocator<char>().allocate(n) is guaranteed only to return a pointer with sufficient alignment for type char.

Warning

For the moment, in some cases ...