Applications to memory allocation

One area where combinatorics can come into play is in determining how much memory an algorithm needs to complete a certain task. It is frequently useful to know this before we run some code. In most programming languages, when arrays are created, they are given a static size that cannot be changed. Therefore, it is faster or more convenient to change an existing value in an array than to change the size of an array.

So, developers often pre-allocate the memory by creating an array of the maximum size we will need for the whole course of the algorithm, either filled with 0s or empty, depending on the language. This is not a problem with small amounts of data, but when the program needs to process exponentially large amounts of data, this can be very wasteful. Understanding memory usage is also important to avoid certain negative consequences: we may use up so many resources on the device that it cannot complete its other tasks, it may crash, or...