ACCU Membership: https://tinyurl.com/ydnfkcyn
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What Your Allocator Is Doing to Your C++ Program? - Sejal Gupta - ACCU 2026
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Dynamic memory allocation is often treated as an implementation detail in C++ programs. Yet in practice, allocator behaviour strongly influences performance, scalability, memory usage, and even correctness. Seemingly unrelated symptoms -latency spikes, memory bloat, allocator contention, or hard-to-reproduce crashes -are frequently rooted in allocation patterns rather than algorithms.
Through this talk we'll examine what actually happens when C++ code allocates memory at runtime. We'll explore how common allocation strategies interact with object lifetime, threading, and cache locality, and how allocator behavior can amplify design decisions made at the C++ level.
We discuss how patterns such as short-lived allocations, shared ownership, and hidden allocation boundaries can lead to fragmentation, contention, and unpredictable performance.
Attendees will leave with a clearer mental model of allocator behavior and concrete guidance for designing C++ systems that are more predictable, scalable, and easier to reason about under real-world workloads.
Slides: https://github.com/Digital-Medium/ACCU-On-Sea-Slides-2026
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Sejal Gupta
Sejal Gupta (She/Her) is a full-time C++ developer, passionate about technology and constantly strives to empower women in tech. She founded a community (WIT++: Women in Tech) where she has mentored 300+ women for STEM careers. She has authored 3 research articles and presented her work at various International Conferences. She currently works as a software engineer. She is a public speaker and loves to talk about solving problems using green computing. Apart from this, she also enjoys cooking.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sejal-gupta-she-her/ Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57222596059 Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=8O4uOVYAAAAJ
Video Sponsored By JetBrains, Bloomberg Engineering & HRT
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The ACCU Conference is the annual conference of the ACCU membership, but is open to any and all who wish to attend. The tagline for the ACCU is 'Professionalism in Programming', which captures the whole spectrum of programming languages, tools, techniques and processes involved in advancing our craft. While there remains a core of C and C++ - with many members participating in respective ISO standards bodies - the conference, like the organisation, embraces other language ecosystems and you should expect to see sessions on C#, D, F#, Go, Javascript, Haskell, Java, Kotlin, Lisp, Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift and more.The ACCU Conference is a conference by programmers for programmers about programming.
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2026 Program: https://accuonsea.uk/2026/schedule/index.html
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