MemForge Academy

Master C++ memory management for game development. Taught by a Scala functional programming expert who bridges high-level paradigms with low...

San Jose del Monte, PH

•Created by

brokeadjunct

2 joined

Home

Products Reviews

@brokeadjunct

Jun 9

Why Every Game Dev Should Understand Custom Allocators

Most C++ tutorials teach you new and delete and call it a day. But in game development, the default allocator is your enemy.

The problem

Every call to malloc/new hits the OS. The OS doesn't care about your frame budget. One allocation at the wrong time and your buttery 60fps drops to 45 — and players feel it.

What AAA studios actually do

They build custom allocators:

Arena allocators — grab a big block upfront, hand out pieces in O(1), reset instantly
Pool allocators — pre-allocate fixed-size slots for bullets, particles, enemies. Zero fragmentation.
Stack allocators — LIFO allocation for hierarchical data like scene graphs

// Default allocator: ~200ns per allocation, unpredictable
Enemy* e = new Enemy();

// Pool allocator: ~3ns per allocation, deterministic
Enemy* e = enemyPool.acquire();

That's a 66x speedup on every entity spawn.

The deeper issue: fragmentation

After 30 minutes of gameplay, thousands of allocs/frees turn your heap into Swiss cheese. 100MB free but can't allocate 1MB contiguously. The game crashes on console where there's no swap space.

Custom allocators prevent this entirely.

Want to learn this properly?

I built a complete course taking you from stack vs heap fundamentals to building a production multi-tier allocator system — the same architecture used in real game engines.

Every lesson bridges functional programming concepts to C++ memory management.

MemForge Academy — Zero leaks. Max frames. Ship your game engine. 🎮

@brokeadjunct

Jun 9

Why Every Game Dev Should Understand Custom Allocators

Most C++ tutorials teach you new and delete and call it a day. But in game development, the default allocator is your enemy.

The problem

Every call to malloc/new hits the OS. The OS doesn't care about your frame budget. One allocation at the wrong time and your buttery 60fps drops to 45 for a single frame — and players feel it.

What AAA studios actually do

They build custom allocators — specialized memory systems that:

Arena allocators — grab a big block upfront, hand out pieces in O(1), reset the whole thing instantly
Pool allocators — pre-allocate fixed-size slots for bullets, particles, enemies. Zero fragmentation.
Stack allocators — LIFO allocation for hierarchical data like scene graphs

// Default allocator: ~200ns per allocation, unpredictable
Enemy* e = new Enemy();

// Pool allocator: ~3ns per allocation, deterministic
Enemy* e = enemyPool.acquire();

That's a 66x speedup on every entity spawn.

The deeper issue: fragmentation

After 30 minutes of gameplay, thousands of allocations and frees have turned your heap into Swiss cheese. You have 100MB free but can't allocate 1MB contiguously. The game crashes on console where there's no swap space.

Custom allocators prevent this entirely by controlling where and how memory is laid out.

Want to learn this properly?

I built a complete course that takes you from stack vs heap fundamentals to building a production multi-tier allocator system — the same architecture used in real game engines.

Every lesson bridges functional programming concepts to C++ memory management, so if you're coming from Scala, Haskell, or Rust, your intuition transfers directly.

MemForge Academy — Zero leaks. Max frames. Ship your game engine. 🎮