🌾 Grain

A C++ memory manager for grain-sized objects.

Developed as final project of the Advanced C++ course for the Master in Computer Game Development.

Overview

The project is based on Andrei Alexandrescu's SmallObjectAllocator, described in his Modern C++ Design book.

The generic, long names he used in his implementation looked pretty ugly to me, so I decided to give them a farming twist, mapping each to a concrete item related to grains of wheat:

Name	Analogy	Original Name
Granary	Main storage of different kinds of grain	SmallObjectAllocator
Sack	Set of grains of the same kind (size)	FixedAllocator
Handful	A small handful of grains	Chunk
Grain	Smallest distributable unit	Memory block

Note

I'm well aware that this entire grain metaphor-thing makes the code pretty unreadable, but readability and usability in general are really not the point here.

This is a simple University project, aiming to replicate an existing implementation, and is obviously not meant to appear in real-world codebases. I just wanted to have some fun while working on it.

Build and Test

The project comes with a cross-platform CMake configuration. You can build the project from the command line or open it as a folder in Visual Studio, leaving it to the IDE to automatically load the targets.

Tests are split into separate executables that you can run from the CMake targets.
On POSIX you can run them all with a simple make test.