C memory management

Hey /prog, I'm teaching myself C by writing a roguelike and I noticed that C uses manual memory management for creating objects in the heap. I was wondering if the C-gods could lend me some advice on how to proceed with this:

I want to write a roguelike with thousands of NPCs, every NPC is a really small piece of data which does not contain any pointers (position, stats, behavior... probably ends up being a few bytes). NPCs would spawn and die constantly. How would I go about managing the memory for this?

• malloc and free individual NPCs
• Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector
• malloc a big chunk of memory and build some kind of memory manager on top of it (are there techniques for this?)

Please advice.

I CAN'T BELIEVE NONE OF YOU GUYS TOLD ME ABOUT OBSTACK

from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-memory/:

In pooled memory management, each allocation specifies a pool of memory from which it should be allocated. Each pool has a different lifespan. In Apache, there is a pool that lasts the lifetime of the server, one that lasts the lifetime of the connection, one that lasts the lifetime of the requests, and others as well. Therefore, if I have a series of functions that will not generate any data that lasts longer than the connection, I can just allocate it all from the connection pool, knowing that at the end of the connection, it will be freed automatically. Additionally, some implementations allow registering cleanup functions, which get called right before the memory pool is cleared, to do any additional tasks that need to be performed before the memory is cleared (similar to destructors, for you object-oriented folks).

To use pools in your own programs, you can either use GNU libc's obstack implementation or Apache's Apache Portable Runtime. GNU obstacks are nice, because they are included by default in GNU-based Linux distributions. The Apache Portable Runtime is nice because it has a lot of other utilities to handle all aspects of writing multiplatform server software. To learn more about GNU obstacks and Apache's pooled memory implementation, see the links to their documentation in the Resources section.

it seems no true c wizards exist on /prog/
i guess i'll become the first