> What I wrote about is not GC. The other comments about reference counting also unfortunately completely miss the point I made.
I know. I mentioned the GC because of another comment and because reference counting and GCs are the two usual general ways (that I know of) for automating memory management. That's what I had in mind.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, arena allocators are most useful for categories of objects with similar lifetimes and are not in the fully automated category. Because if I have multiple arena allocators, I still have to manually assign an allocator when creating an object and also deal with the lifetimes of the allocators themselves.
Easier than allocating/deallocating individual objects in main memory with malloc, true, and probably more efficient, but still not fully automated, so in my mind they have different use cases.
But it's possible that I haven't really understood them, so if I'm mistaken about their use, please don't leave me in the dark.
If that makes me look like a junior wannabe, I think I can take it. Even the people who know their stuff had some point when they didn't..
I know. I mentioned the GC because of another comment and because reference counting and GCs are the two usual general ways (that I know of) for automating memory management. That's what I had in mind.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, arena allocators are most useful for categories of objects with similar lifetimes and are not in the fully automated category. Because if I have multiple arena allocators, I still have to manually assign an allocator when creating an object and also deal with the lifetimes of the allocators themselves.
Easier than allocating/deallocating individual objects in main memory with malloc, true, and probably more efficient, but still not fully automated, so in my mind they have different use cases.
But it's possible that I haven't really understood them, so if I'm mistaken about their use, please don't leave me in the dark. If that makes me look like a junior wannabe, I think I can take it. Even the people who know their stuff had some point when they didn't..