Allocate/deallocate memory?

[idrougge]

What's the best practice for allocating a chunk of memory in Blitz?

I suppose that arrays are contiguous, and of course they're entirely handled by Blitz (needing less manual handling) but I don't know what the effects of allocating an array of 100 kB or more could be.

Is it better to resort to AllocVec or some other system call?

Specifically, I need some place to load machine code from disk instead of INCBIN.

[Daedalus]

The normal system calls are probably the best bet to do it properly, however Blitz uses Banks as its internal object equivalent if you want to use them:

InitBank 1, 100000, #MEMF_ANY ; Reserve a bank as object ID #1, 100,000 bytes in size, of any memory type

MyAddr.l = Bank(1) ; MyAddr now contains the address of Bank object ID #1

The advantage of this is that it's simple to load data from disk into the memory:

LoadBank 1, "Filename.bin", #MEMF_ANY ; load the file into bank 1, which will be created at the required size

The memory type constants are in amigalibs.res.

Edit: Forgot about the freeing memory part, though it's just like any other Blitz object:

FreeBank 1

[idrougge]

Thanks, and I should have actually read the manual too:

Syntax: MemoryBlock=AllocMem(Size,Type)

Description:
Unlike calling Exec's AllocMem_ command directly Blitz2 will automatically
free any allocated memory when the program ends. Programmers are advised
to use the InitBank command.

So, free cleanup.

[Cylon]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

..., however Blitz uses Banks as its internal object equivalent if you want to use them...

Not completely wrong, but:

BB offers those commands since addition of Amosfunc.lib. Not before. It's for the switchers, only . (DO NOT RECOMMEND, PLEASE).

Please handle your memory allocations wise and professionally. Use the system, or the malloc() that hides inside all stringfuncs for example.

[idrougge]

If I was wise and professional, I wouldn't use Blitz Basic.

[Daedalus]

Yeah, I did say it's probably best to use the system calls, but banks are just soooo convenient I've never had any problems with them, though, as with any Blitz Lib, it's impossible to say that there aren't bugs in there somewhere.

[Daedalus]

Just an update on this. I've been reworking the ADF-Blitzer code for low memory situations, and I've found that InitBank and LoadBank will crash if enough memory isn't available, rather than not initialising. So having a check for a valid address after initialisation is a waste of time - if you program's still running, your allocation was successful. I guess that fits with many more of Blitz's object initialisation commands, many of which also simply crash when they can't create the object.

More worryingly, Blitz's AllocMem() call does the same thing! So it has the nice automatic cleanup and all that, but instead of returning 0 when you don't have enough free RAM, it just crashes.

So I'll have to put a stronger emphasis on using the OS AllocMem_() call, since this is the only one that will fail gracefully in low memory situations.

[idrougge]

I'll put that in my notes, thank you.