Artur Biesiadowski wrote:
>
> After browsing some classpath native code it seems that malloc is used
> for allocating native memory. I'm not sure how portable it is between
> various VMs.
> I'm afraid that in some cases it can just crash vm which manages brk by
> itself. Maybe some level of indirection can be used (memory interface by
> pointers, or just #defines).
There is no well-defined, published way to allocate memory from within
native code. If you are writing a JIT compiler for Sun's VM, part of the
vector of support functions it gives you are the VM's memory allocation
functions (safe for use within your JIT) but this interface is specific
to Sun's JVM.
Probably the best solution would be to have a classpath_malloc and a
classpath_free that are implemented in terms of JNI functions to
allocate arrays of bytes, if portability is desired. There are
potentially some efficiency concerns with this though as the obvious
implementation winds up locking down blocks of memory that the GC would
probably rather move.
alex
