attractivechaos

What is an "arena" in memory allocation?

I first leanred about "arena" when I was trying to understand the internal of [glibc malloc][glibc-alloc] around 2010, but I [later realized][trend] the concept is narrowly defined [in][arena1] [other][arena2] [context][arena3]. This blog post explains the difference in definition and the limitations in the so-called "arena allocators" we use today.

Background: why is malloc needed?