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## swarm.defobj
Interface ZoneS

All Known Subinterfaces:
  GUISwarm, GUISwarmC, GUISwarmS, Swarm, SwarmC, SwarmProcess, SwarmProcessC, SwarmProcessS, SwarmS

All Known Implementing Classes:
  ZoneImpl, ZoneCImpl

public interface ZoneS
extends CreateS, DropS

Modular unit of storage allocation.. A zone is a source of storage for objects or other allocated data. Whenever a new object is created, a zone must be identified from which the storage for its instance variables, or other internal data, is obtained. A program may establish multiple zones to ensure that objects with similar lifetime or storage needs are allocated together, and in general to optimize allocation and reuse of storage. Zones also maintain a collection of all objects allocated within the zone. This collection, referred to as the "population" of a zone, is a set of all objects which have been created but not yet dropped within the zone. Collections maintained automatically by zones can eliminate a need for other, separately maintained collections in applications that need to keep track of entire populations of objects. Collections of allocated objects can provide support for object query, external object storage, and automatic storage reclamation. A zone may be used to obtain storage not only for objects, but also for raw storage blocks like those provided by the C malloc function. All objects and storage blocks allocated in a zone remain local to that zone. This means that allocation of storage in other zones does not affect the efficiency of storage allocation within a particular zone. For most zone types, individual allocations may still be freed within a zone, and total storage of a zone may grow and shrink according to aggregate needs. In addition to freeing individual allocations, an entire zone may also dropped. Dropping a zone automatically frees all object allocations made within it, including final drop processing on any allocated objects that need it. Release of an entire zone can be much faster than individual release of each object within it. The Zone type is a fully implemented type that provides default storage management support for objects and other allocated storage. It is also a supertype for other zones that implement alternative policies for use in specialized situations. A zone is created using standard create messages just like other objects. This means that a zone must identify another zone from which it obtains its storage. Storage is typically obtained from this other zone in large units called pages, which are then managed by the local zone to support internal allocations. The getZone message of the DefinedObject type returns the zone which provides these base pages. Since a new zone always requires that an existing zone be identified, no new zones could be created unless there were some zones that already existed. Two such zones are predefined as part of the defobj library: globalZone and scratchZone.

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