C++ High Performance

Heap memory

The heap or the free store, which is a more correct term in C++, is where data with dynamic storage lives. As mentioned earlier, the heap is shared among multiple threads, which means that memory management for the heap needs to take concurrency into account.

This makes memory allocations in the heap more complicated than stack allocations, which are local per thread.

The allocation and deallocation pattern for stack memory is sequential in the sense that memory is always deallocated in the reverse order to that in which it was allocated. On the other hand, for dynamic memory, the allocations and deallocations can happen arbitrarily. The dynamic lifetime of objects and the variable sizes of memory allocations increase the risk ...