MemMgr is a fairly trivial memory management library. There is little it does that cannot be done using routines in the C library. (In fact, allocation and disposal is implemented using C library routines.) The purposes of MemMgr are two- fold. (i) Minimize configuration burden on applications that dynamically allocate memory. For instance, malloc() on some systems returns a char pointer; on others it returns a void pointer. The MemMgr library routines encapsulate system-specific configuration differences and exports a fixed interface which is system-indepen- dent. Once you compile and install it, you just use it without thinking about whether your UNIX is System V or BSD inspired. (ii) Provide two parallel sets of allocation routines which either return NULL (for applications which want to check) or panic (for applications which simply want to die) on allocation failures. Panicking is implemented using the ETM library, which introduces a dependency on the ETM distribution. So be it. I use ETM for all my programs anyway