Arena Allocator (Go)

A custom memory allocator for Go, using arena-style allocation and an optional sharded design for concurrency. It’s a clean, dependency-free implementation focused on speed, predictability, and simple lifetimes (allocate many; free all at once, or via marks).

This project demonstrates:

• bump-pointer arenas (contiguous regions, super fast)
• mmap-backed allocation (large regions)
• thread-safe “safe arena”
• sharded arenas for parallel workloads
• unit tests & benchmarks
• simple demo apps

Note: The earlier guarded arena (debug build with mprotect) was removed to keep the project simple.

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🚀 Features

• Arena-based allocation: contiguous region with bump pointer
• Marks & release: reclaim allocations back to a previous point
• Thread-safe mode: SafeArena with internal sync
• Sharding: multiple arenas for multi-core concurrency
• Typed helpers: allocate typed values and slices
• Zero dependencies: pure Go
• Tests & Benchmarks: go test, -bench, -benchmem
• Makefile: easy build/run/test/bench/fmt/vet/clean

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📦 Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/joss12/arena-allocator.git
cd arena-allocator
go mod tidy
go test -bench=. -benchmem