Custom Memory Management
Explore how to create custom memory managers in C++ by understanding memory allocation basics and designing arenas. Learn when and why customizing memory management can improve debugging, sandboxing, and performance, and gain practical insights into implementing efficient memory allocation strategies.
We'll cover the following...
Designing a custom memory
We have come a long way in this chapter now. We have covered the basics of virtual memory, the stack and the heap, the new and delete expressions, memory ownership, and alignment and padding. But before we close this chapter, we will show how to customize memory management in C++. We will see how the parts we went through earlier in this chapter will come in handy when writing a custom memory allocator.
But first, what is a custom memory manager, and why do we need one?
When using new or malloc() to allocate memory, we use the built-in memory management system in C++. Most implementations of operator new use malloc(), a general-purpose memory allocator. Designing and building a general-purpose memory manager is a complicated task, and there are many people who have ...