memoryobjects

Memory objects are abstract representations of memory blocks used by software systems to track, manage, and protect regions of memory. They encapsulate the actual memory region (address and size) along with metadata describing its permissions, lifecycle, and usage. In many runtimes, memory objects serve as the unit of allocation and deallocation, separate from the raw memory channels provided by the operating system.

Typical fields include base address, size, access rights, allocation status, lifetime age, reference counts, and provenance (allocator). Some systems track additional attributes such as alignment, region tags, or residency in hardware caches. Memory objects thus provide a uniform abstraction across different memory backends and allocation strategies.

Lifecycle: memory objects are created on allocation, may be grown or shrunk if supported, and are deallocated when no references remain or when explicitly freed. Managing memory objects can involve garbage collection, reference counting, or manual freeing. Fragmentation is a concern; various strategies such as pooling, compaction, or defragmentation are used to maintain usable free memory and minimize overhead.

In practice, memory objects appear in different layers: language runtimes (for example, managed heaps), operating system kernel memory objects (page frames or memory regions), and specialized libraries (memory pools). They enable isolation, portability, and security by enforcing bounds checks and protection against out-of-bounds access, while supporting efficient reuse of memory.

Criticism and limitations include the overhead of metadata, potential performance costs, and the complexity of allocator design. Memory objects are part of broader memory management strategies, including garbage collection, paging, and virtual memory. See also memory management, heap, garbage collector, memory pool, virtual memory, and memory protection.