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From: sandra@utah-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: how to allocate a big chunk of memory?
Message-ID: <4464@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Apr-87 22:13:08 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.4464
Posted: Tue Apr  7 22:13:08 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Apr-87 03:20:09 EST
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 18
Keywords: malloc, Malloc

The Lisp system I've been hacking on occasionally needs to use a large chunk
of memory (like about 200K) for scratch storage during garbage collection.  
I would like to allocate this memory dynamically and free it when GC is 
complete, so that there will normally be some memory left over that the user
could use to spawn an editor process (or whatever) from Lisp.  I've heard 
that "malloc" works fine when repetitively allocating and freeing blocks 
of memory, but unfortunately it only takes a word argument to specify the
size of the block to allocate -- far too small for my needs.  I've also heard
that "Malloc" (which does take a longword argument) has bugs that cause it
to eat memory.  

So what's the right thing to do?  I thought of maybe using the C functions
brk and sbrk and bypassing malloc altogether, but being a Lisp hacker and
not a C hacker, I'm not real sure if this will do what I want.  Any
suggestions?

-Sandra Loosemore
sandra@utah-cs.uucp, sandra@cs.utah.edu