> I don't quite follow, who's stopping you from using sbrk(), mmap() and all the other low level allocation system calls if you really have to? From a pure lan

> I don't quite follow, who's stopping you from using sbrk(), mmap() and all the other low level allocation system calls if you really have to? From a pure language perspective, nothing. From a standard library perspective... it's probably more difficult. I won't say impossible, as the STL allocator concept certainly seems general enough to allow this, but definitely more difficult.