author

Richard Brooksby

organization

Ravenbrook Limited

date

2002-05-20

revision

$Id$

confidentiality

public

This is the Memory Pool System Kit -- a complete set of sources for using, modifying, and adapting the MPS. This document will give you a very brief overview and tell you where to find more information.

The Memory Pool System (MPS) is a very general, adaptable, flexible, reliable, and efficient memory management system. It permits the flexible combination of memory management techniques, supporting manual and automatic memory management, in-line allocation, finalization, weakness, and multiple concurrent co-operating incremental generational garbage collections. It also includes a library of memory pool classes implementing specialized memory management policies.

The MPS has been in development since 1994 and deployed in successful commercial products since 1997. Bugs are almost unknown in production. It is under continuous development and support by Ravenbrook.

The MPS is distributed under the BSD 2-clause open source license (see license.txt).

The MPS Kit is a complete set of sources and documentation to enable you to use, modify, and adapt the MPS: source code, manuals, procedures, design documentation, and so on. See the manual for an index. (If for some reason the manual isn't available, you can build it. See below.)

The MPS Kit is distributed in source form. You need to build it before using it. The basic case is straightforward on supported platforms (see below):

cd code
cc -O2 -c mps.c     Unix / macOS (with Xcode command line)
cl /O2 /c mps.c     Windows (with Microsoft SDK or Visual Studio 2010)

This will produce an object file you can link with your project. For details of how to configure the MPS, build the manual, libraries and tests, use IDEs, autoconf, etc. see Building the MPS.

For an example of using the MPS, see the Scheme interpreter example.

Then, to program and integrate the MPS you'll definitely need to read the manual.

The MPS is currently supported for deployment on:

• Windows Vista or later, on IA-32 and x86-64, using Microsoft Visual C/C++;
• Linux 2.6 or later, on IA-32 using GCC and on x86-64 using GCC or Clang/LLVM;
• FreeBSD 7 or later, on IA-32 and x86-64, using GCC or Clang/LLVM;
• macOS 10.4 or later, on x86-64, using Clang/LLVM.

The MPS is highly portable and has run on many other processors and operating systems in the past (see Building the MPS). Most of the MPS is written in very pure ANSI C and compiles without warnings on anything.

You can obtain expert professional support for the MPS from Ravenbrook Limited, the developers of the MPS, who have many years of experience in commercial memory management systems. Write to us at mps-questions@ravenbrook.com for more information.

You might also want to join the MPS discussion mailing list. To join, visit http://mailman.ravenbrook.com/mailman/listinfo/mps-discussion .

Copyright © 2001–2020 Ravenbrook Limited.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.