CppCon 2017: Bob Steagall “How to Write a Custom Allocator”

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You'd like to improve the performance of your application with regard to memory management, and you believe this can be accomplished by writing a custom allocator. But where do you start? Modern C++ brings many improvements to the standard allocator model, but with those improvements come several issues that must be addressed when designing a new allocator.

This talk will provide guidance on how to write custom allocators for the C++14/C++17 standard containers. It will cover the requirements specified by the standard, and will describe the facilities provided by the standard to support the new allocator model and allocator-aware containers. We'll look at the issues of allocator identity and propagation, and examine their implications for standard library users, standard library implementers, and custom allocator implementers. We'll see how a container uses its allocator, including when and how a container's allocator instance propagates. This will give us the necessary background to describe allocators that implement unusual semantics, such as a stateful allocator type whose instances compare non-equal. Finally, the talk will provide some guidelines for how to specify a custom allocator's public interface based on the semantics it provides.
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Bob Steagall: KEWB Computing, CppCon 2017 Poster Chair

I've been working in C++ for the last 25 years. The majority of my career has been spent in medical imaging, where I led teams building applications for functional MRI and CT-based cardiac visualization. After a brief journey through the world of DNS and analytics, I'm now working in the area of stream processing.
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[sicko]

Watching this after John Lakos' talk
Such a beautiful follow up

[seidenada]

Don't watch this talk if you are looking for some code examples. The subject is more like "What traits and types you should study in order to be able to write a custom allocator". Good material though.

[kinershah]

Very good presentation. He must have done a lot of research and studying to compile the content for this presentation.

[tohopes]

20:10 deep propagation of alligators

pretty scary!

[fwang]

I love this man! thanks for these wonderful presentations!

[sproccoli]

i do not support alligator propagation. We have enough of them already.

[lorenzobolis]

Anyone care to explain what the example at 11:00 is, or how it can be used? Because I have no clue whatsoever

[anon_y_mousse]

Very informative, but Bob needs to incorporate some levity and differ the pitch of his voice from time to time. I nearly fell asleep.

[pajeetsingh]

Why can't we just use new and delete again?