TheHeap is a (somewhat archaic, but still in common use) term for the memory from which a program may dynamically allocate memory blocks.
TheHeap may or may not be contiguous. Lots of different allocation strategies are used to assign a particular memory block for a given request (
FirstFit,
BestFit, etc.).
Not to be confused with the data structure known as a "heap" (
HeapDataStructure--think
HeapSort).
Some languages (such as
CeePlusPlus) provide a way for different data types to be allocated from different heaps. This can be used to improve performance, but unless the programmer knows what he/she is doing, this frequently makes things worse. Unless it is done in response to profiling showing that the "default" memory allocator is a bottleneck, this is
PrematureOptimization.
- Unfortunately, there are still many C/C++ implementations out there with lousy implementations of malloc/OperatorNew.