CppCon 2015: Andrei Alexandrescu “std::allocator...”

Andrei Alexandrescu critiques C++'s std::allocator and proposes building high-performance allocators from small, composable, templated pieces.

Cppcon.org — std::allocator Is to Allocation what std::vector Is to Vexation -- Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/cppcon/cppcon2015 — std::allocator has an inglorious past, murky present, and cheerless future. STL introduced allocators as a stop gap for the now antiquated segmented memory models of the 1990s. Their design was limited and in many ways wasn't even aiming at helping allocation that much. Because allocators were there, they simply continued being there, up to the point they became impossible to either uproot or make work, in spite of valiant effort spent by the community. But this talk aims at spending less time on poking criticism at std::allocator and more on actually defining allocator APIs that work. Scalable, high-performance memory allocation is a topic of increasing importance in today's demanding applications. For such, std::allocator simply doesn't work. This talk discusses the full design of a memory allocator created from first principles. It is generic, componentized, and composable for supporting application-specific allocation patterns. — Andrei Alexandrescu is a researcher, software engineer, and author. He wrote three best-selling books on programming (Modern C++ Design, C++ Coding Standards, and The D Programming Language) and numerous articles and papers on wide-ranging topics from programming to language design to Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing. Andrei holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from University "Politehnica" Bucharest. He works as a Research Scientist for Facebook.Website: erdani.comTwitter handle: @incomputable — Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf