19962016 Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. erl_malloc Torbjörn Törnkvist Torbjörn Törnkvist Bjarne Däcker Torbjörn Törnkvist 1998-07-03 A erl_malloc.xml
erl_malloc Memory allocation functions.

This module provides functions for allocating and deallocating memory.

 ETERM *erl_alloc_eterm(etype) Allocate an ETERM structure. unsigned char etype;

Allocates an structure.

Specify as one of the following constants:

ERL_INTEGER ERL_U_INTEGER (unsigned integer) ERL_ATOM ERL_PID (Erlang process identifier) ERL_PORT ERL_REF (Erlang reference) ERL_LIST ERL_EMPTY_LIST ERL_TUPLE ERL_BINARY ERL_FLOAT ERL_VARIABLE ERL_SMALL_BIG (bignum) ERL_U_SMALL_BIG (bignum)

and are for creating Erlang , which can contain integers of any size. The size of an integer in Erlang is machine-dependent, but any integer > 2^28 requires a bignum.

 voiderl_eterm_release(void) Clear the ETERM freelist.

Clears the freelist, where blocks are placed when they are released by and .

 voiderl_eterm_statistics(allocated, freed) Report term allocation statistics. long *allocated; long *freed;

Reports term allocation statistics.

and are initialized to contain information about the fix-allocator used to allocate ETERM components.

is the number of blocks currently allocated to ETERM objects.

is the length of the freelist, where blocks are placed when they are released by and .

 voiderl_free(ptr) Free some memory. void *ptr;

Calls the standard function.

 voiderl_free_array(array, size) Free an array of ETERM structures. ETERM **array; int size;

Frees an array of Erlang terms.

is an array of ETERM* objects. is the number of terms in the array. voiderl_free_compound(t) Free an array of ETERM structures. ETERM *t;

Normally it is the programmer's responsibility to free each Erlang term that has been returned from any of the functions. However, as many of the functions that build new Erlang terms in fact share objects with other existing terms, it can be difficult for the programmer to maintain pointers to all such terms to free them individually.

recursively frees all of the subterms associated with a specified Erlang term, regardless of whether we are still holding pointers to the subterms.

For an example, see section Building Terms and Patterns in the User's Guide.

 voiderl_free_term(t) Free an ETERM structure. ETERM *t;

Frees an Erlang term.

 voiderl_malloc(size) Allocate some memory. long size;

Calls the standard function.