C++ High Performance

Custom memory management

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 are going to show how to customize the memory management in C++. We will see how the parts that 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(), which is a general-purpose memory allocator. In other words, designing and building ...