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simonask an hour ago

> AAA games use allocators extensively

They do, but not necessarily together with generic, standard containers.

When you find yourself wanting a nonstandard allocator, you usually want it because you want it to have some interesting property. It's not necessarily trivial to fit that into the interface of something like `std::vector`, or `std::unordered_map`, etc.

Here's my take as a game developer: 99% of use cases for custom allocators are scratch allocators for doing stuff within a frame. 95% of those are much easier to serve by just amortizing allocations by storing things in an `std::vector` (or equivalent) that gets cleared every frame. You can use linear storage to back many interesting data structures, including queues, ring buffers, priority queues, binary heaps, etc., and that's more than enough for a large number of systems in a game.

The overwhelming majority of the time, more complex data structures (like hash maps etc.) have a longer lifetime than the current frame, because the whole point of using them in the first place is to amortize lookup time across frames.