Summary

This chapter has covered a lot of ground, starting with the basics of virtual memory and finally implementing a custom allocator that can be used by containers from the standard library. A good understanding of how your program uses memory is important. Overuse of dynamic memory can be a performance bottleneck that you might need to optimize away.

Before you start implementing your own containers or custom memory allocators, bear in mind that many people before you have probably had very similar memory issues to the ones you may face. So, there is a good chance that the right tool for you is already out there in a library. Building custom memory managers that are fast, safe, and robust is a challenge.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to benefit from the newly introduced feature of C++ concepts, and how we can use template metaprogramming to have the compiler generate code for us.