Somewhat ironically, a major secondary reason we used custom allocators in games (performance bring the primary reason) was to find and diagnose memory bugs. Lo

Somewhat ironically, a major secondary reason we used custom allocators in games (performance bring the primary reason) was to find and diagnose memory bugs. Long before ASAN existed I worked with some very powerful in house memory debugging tools at EA, some of the functionality of which I still haven't seen matched in commercial or open source tools. Security wasn't the primary concern back then, it was avoiding memory leaks on platforms with no virtual memory and tight memory constraints and squashing bugs.