Why you should care about memory

As a programmer, you're probably already used to using new and delete (or malloc and free if you're writing C), and you may be wondering why you would want to handle memory by yourself when it's already built into the language and is easy to use. Well, the first thing is that like most aspects of using a high-level programming language, you do not know what is going on behind the scenes. If you write your own logic to handle memory, you can create your own statistics and additional debugging support, such as automatically initializing data. You can also check for things such as memory leaks.

However, for game developers the most important aspect to look into is that of performance. Allocating memory for a single object or thousands of them at once is approximately the same time as the computer needs to look through your computer's memory for an opening that isn't being used, and then give you the address to the beginning of that contiguous piece of memory...