From my experience in the games industry, this technique is fairly common. Not so much in the sense of 'hiding' megs away from other programmers, but having te

From my experience in the games industry, this technique is fairly common. Not so much in the sense of 'hiding' megs away from other programmers, but having team buffer space (by 'team' I mean engine-team, AI team,...). For example as an engine programmer you'd want to pre-allocate space for various resources (models, textures, etc.); some stuff is dynamic, like the currently active game entities. So you'd have preallocated chunks of memory for N entities, where N is the maximum number of entities you could handle at that time (at every opportunity you'd want to avoid classic memory allocators because they're slow and a fragmented heap could kill your game on a limited memory device; so everything would be done with fixed block-size, fixed length, linked-lists). It was relatively easy to 'hide' buffer space for a rainy day because the list sizes would just be magic numbers that were decided as 'roughly what we'll need for later'. They could be per level magic numbers, or system wide magic numbers. Nobody gives a shit about the magic numbers at the start of the project on development devices with more memory than the final device, and mostly nobody even knows what the game's going to be early on (this was something I saw a lot in the games industry: teams just feeling in the dark for what it is they're supposed to be doing for months on end). Towards the end of a project when things are tight, and you have a better sense of how much of each type of thing you'll need, that's when you start giving up the buffer. Reading TFA reminded me of how much I do not miss working in the games industry. It was fun while it lasted (I did it for 10 years, I left 10 years ago), but after a while this style of programming drags you down. It's too much stress, for mostly not enough reward. The last game I worked on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9zMWu6PfSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9zMWu6PfSM