Polymorphic Allocator
C++ 17 has introduced Polymorphic allocator as an enhancement to the standard allocator from the Standard Library.
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Polymorphic Allocator
To be concise, a polymorphic allocator conforms to the rules of an allocator from the Standard Library.
However, at its core, it uses a memory resource object to perform memory management.
Polymorphic Allocator contains a pointer to a memory resource class, and that’s why it can use a virtual method dispatch. You can change the memory resource at runtime while keeping the type of the allocator.
All the types for polymorphic allocators live in a separate namespace std::pmr
(PMR stands for Polymorphic Memory Resource), in the <memory_resource>
header.
Core elements of pmr
:
std::pmr::memory_resource
- is an abstract base class for all other implementations. It defines the following pure virtual methods: