Can coding style cause or influence memory fragmentation?
- by Robert Dailey
As the title states, I'd like to know if coding style can cause or influence memory fragmentation in a native application, specifically one written using C++. If it does, I'd like to know how.
An example of what I mean by coding style is using std::string to represent strings (even static strings) and perform operations on them instead of using the C Library (such as strcmp, strlen, and so on) which can work both on dynamic strings and static strings (the latter point is beneficial since it does not require an additional allocation to access string functions, which is not the case with std::string).
A "forward-looking" attitude I have with C++ is to not use the CRT, since to do so would, in a way, be a step backwards. However, such a style results in more dynamic allocations, and especially for a long living application like a server, this causes some speculation that memory fragmentation might become a problem.
