...be aware that in Windows, there are two main ways to allocate memory: HeapAlloc(), which comes from your process heap and is equivalent to Posix malloc(), an

...be aware that in Windows, there are two main ways to allocate memory: HeapAlloc(), which comes from your process heap and is equivalent to Posix malloc(), and VirtualAlloc(), which comes from the kernel and is the equivalent to allocating anonymous pages with mmap(). (Windows malloc() usually wraps HeapAlloc().) So he's not necessarily completely wrong. If he's used to a system where the default C++ allocator uses VirtualAlloc() but malloc() still uses HeapAlloc(), then referring to memory allocated from VirtualAlloc() as 'virtual memory' makes sense, in a specialist weird-windows-terminology kind of way. ('Virtual memory', here, having nothing to do with virtual memory in the Linux sense.)