I used the same technique for an image editor which had a similar need for caching.

Each operation that was applied to an image, produced a new image that was the results of the previous manipulation. The buffers for the images were allocated from a built-in virtual memory manager that used an LRU caching mechanism.

The really nice thing about the technique is it allows you to try two of three different enhancement techniques on the base image and compare them side by side before choosing which one to commit to. Also has the added bonus of making Undo a simple free current and back up to the previous version.

That whole thing was written in a macro assembler, but it was object oriented to the point where the syntax for adding a number from memory to a register was

 
esi.load     Object;
eax.add      Object.Number;
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Thankfully, it was someone elses job to write the virtual memory manager:)