It’s not nearly as true anymore today, but working in console games 10-20 years ago, it was very common to try to avoid dynamic memory allocation because it was viewed as slow, unsafe, and unnecessary. A common strategy was to statically pre-allocate a single block of the worst-case memory needed for a given feature, because you need to be prepared to hit the worst case without crashing, so you might as well just reserve the max and focus on reducing what the maximum possible usage is.
I once debugged a crash in a console game that was caused by someone trying to be too clever by half with their allocation and copy constructors. We had a team of a dozen people working on the crash through a weekend during crunch because the crash only occurred in a release build on the console dev kit. The cost of this one stupid bug due to using memory allocation could literally accounted for in the thousands of dollars. I basically had to write a mini one-off release-build stack-tracing sampling debugger in order to trap it. So, anyway, long story short, I’m old enough to appreciate why some people suggest that avoiding allocations is a good thing.
There’s a famous list of NASA’s rules for safety-critical code that you’ll see pop up now and then, that subscribes to the “avoid heap memory allocation” philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
It’s not nearly as true anymore today, but working in console games 10-20 years ago, it was very common to try to avoid dynamic memory allocation because it was viewed as slow, unsafe, and unnecessary. A common strategy was to statically pre-allocate a single block of the worst-case memory needed for a given feature, because you need to be prepared to hit the worst case without crashing, so you might as well just reserve the max and focus on reducing what the maximum possible usage is.
I once debugged a crash in a console game that was caused by someone trying to be too clever by half with their allocation and copy constructors. We had a team of a dozen people working on the crash through a weekend during crunch because the crash only occurred in a release build on the console dev kit. The cost of this one stupid bug due to using memory allocation could literally accounted for in the thousands of dollars. I basically had to write a mini one-off release-build stack-tracing sampling debugger in order to trap it. So, anyway, long story short, I’m old enough to appreciate why some people suggest that avoiding allocations is a good thing.