RE: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19

Andy Nelson
2005-11-07T20:55:33Z

Hi,

>Isn't it true that most of the times we'll need to be worrying about
>run-time allocation of memory (using malloc or such) as compared to
>static.

Perhaps for C. Not neccessarily true for Fortran. I don't know
anything about how memory allocations proceed there, but there
are no `malloc' calls (at least with that spelling) in the language
itself, and I don't know what it does for either static or dynamic
allocations under the hood. It could be malloc like or whatever
else. In the language itself, there are language features for
allocating and deallocating memory and I've seen code that
uses them, but haven't played with it myself, since my codes
need pretty much all the various pieces memory all the time,
and so are simply statically defined.

If you call something like malloc yourself, you risk portability
problems in Fortran. Fortran 2003 supposedly addresses some of
this with some C interop features, but only got approved within
the last year, and no compilers really exist for it yet, let
alone having code written.

Andy