Most programs can be quite casual about heap allocation, even to the extent that functional programming languages prefer to allocate new objects than modify old ones, and let the garbage collector worry about freeing things.In embedded programming, the silent sector, however, there are many applications where you can't use heap allocation at all, due to memory and hard real-time constraints; the number of objects of each type that will be handled is part of the specification, and everything is statically allocated.Games programming (at least with those games that are ambitious about pushing the hardware) sometimes falls in between: you can use dynamic allocation, but there are enough memory and soft real-time constraints that you can't treat the allocator as a black box, let alone use garbage collection, so you have to use custom allocators. This is one of the reasons C++ is still widely used in the games industry; it lets you do things like http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2271.htmlWhat other domains are in that in-between territory? Where, apart from games, are custom allocators heavily used?
Custom heap allocators
c++;embedded systems;memory;heap