Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

As far as the respective language standards go, C offers dynamic memory allocation only through the malloc() family, while in C++ the most common form of allocation is performed by ::operator new() . The C-style malloc is also available in C++, and many "baby's first allocator" examples use it as its core allocation function, but I am curious how contemporary compilers implement the actual production operator-new. Is it just a thin wrapper around malloc() , or is it implemented fundamentally differently on account of the rather different memory allocation behaviour of a typical C++ program compared to a typical C program? [ Edit: I believe the main difference is usually described as follows: A C program has fewer, larger, long-lived allocations, while a C++ program has many, small, short-lived allocations. Feel free to chime in if that's mistaken, but it sounds like one would benefit from taking this into account.] For a compiler like GCC it would be easy to just have one single core allocation implementation and use that for all relevant languages, so I wonder if there are differences in the details that try to optimize the resulting allocation performance in each language. Update: Thanks for all the great answers! It looks like in GCC this is completely solved by ptmalloc , and that MSVC also uses malloc at the core. Does anyone know how the MSVC-malloc is implemented?

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel