How to allocate and free memory dynamically?

[lejosfan]

Hello experts.

I am writing a native function for the Lejos VM and the function needs to allocate some memory dynamically for a multi-precision number computation (memory allocated could be around 2K), which would be released immediately after the computation. I saw some functions in memory.c (java_allocate(), system_allocate()), but not sure which is the correct one to use as none is working.

Advice much appreciated.

Thanks.

[gloomyandy]

My first question would be why do you need to write a native function to do this? What does the native function do? Is there any reason why you can't simply allocate the memory from Java and then i you really need a native unction pass the memory to that when it is needed. Memory handling in any JVM is typically complex and even more so in native code, and especially so in a system like leJOS, you really have to understand what it is you are doing, if not it is very easy to create problems which result in memory access errors. My advice would be to everything you can to avoid writing native code, and if you have to write native code do the absolute minimum in that native code and do as much as possible in Java...

Andy

[lejosfan]

Hi Andy.

You have a good point. The problem, though, is that there is no Java library that does multi-precision computation, such as what BigInteger does in the desktop, with acceptable performance. To give you an idea, running native code, a message (basically a 255 byte array) decryption is taking 30 seconds. Even if you write Java to do some of that work, you would still have to write some functionality in native for speed. Which goes back to the original question: What would be the best way to handle this? Any existing function in the VM code that I could call?

I'd love to use Lejos for my encryption/decryption schemme.

Thanks.

[gloomyandy]

As I said before I would try and allocate any memory that you require in Java and pass a reference to that data into your native code. I'd still be tempted to use Java to begin with and to simply move the hot parts of that code into native methods...

[lejosfan]

Andy, I see your points.

Thanks.
Lejosfan