bumpalo

A fast bump allocation arena for Rust.

Bump Allocation

Bump allocation is a fast, but limited approach to allocation. We have a chunk of memory, and we maintain a pointer within that memory. Whenever we allocate an object, we do a quick test that we have enough capacity left in our chunk to allocate the object and then update the pointer by the object's size. That's it!

The disadvantage of bump allocation is that there is no general way to deallocate individual objects or reclaim the memory region for a no-longer-in-use object.

These trade offs make bump allocation well-suited for phase-oriented allocations. That is, a group of objects that will all be allocated during the same program phase, used, and then can all be deallocated together as a group.

Deallocation en Masse, but No Drop

To deallocate all the objects in the arena at once, we can simply reset the bump pointer back to the start of the arena's memory chunk. This makes mass deallocation extremely fast, but allocated objects' Drop implementations are not invoked.

What happens when the memory chunk is full?

This implementation will allocate a new memory chunk from the global allocator and then start bump allocating into this new memory chunk.

Example

use bumpalo::Bump;
use std::u64;

struct Doggo {
    cuteness: u64,
    age: u8,
    scritches_required: bool,
}

// Create a new arena to bump allocate into.
let bump = Bump::new();

// Allocate values into the arena.
let scooter = bump.alloc(Doggo {
    cuteness: u64::max_value(),
    age: 8,
    scritches_required: true,
});

assert!(scooter.scritches_required);

Collections

When the on-by-default "collections" feature is enabled, a fork of some of the std library's collections are available in the collections module. These collection types are modified to allocate their space inside bumpalo::Bump arenas.

use bumpalo::{Bump, collections::Vec};

// Create a new bump arena.
let bump = Bump::new();

// Create a vector of integers whose storage is backed by the bump arena. The
// vector cannot outlive its backing arena, and this property is enforced with
// Rust's lifetime rules.
let mut v = Vec::new_in(&bump);

// Push a bunch of integers onto `v`!
for i in 0..100 {
    v.push(i);
}

Eventually all std collection types will be parameterized by an allocator and we can remove this collections module and use the std versions.

#![no_std] Support

Bumpalo is a no_std crate. It depends only on the alloc and core crates.