HALO: post-link heap-layout optimisation

Abstract

Today, general-purpose memory allocators dominate the landscape of dynamic memory management. While these solutions can provide reasonably good behaviour across a wide range of workloads, it is an unfortunate reality that their behaviour for any particular workload can be highly suboptimal. By catering primarily to average and worst-case usage patterns, these allocators deny programs the advantages of domain-specific optimisations, and thus may inadvertently place data in a manner that hinders performance, generating unnecessary cache misses and load stalls.