Memory Allocation Hooks

Internal allocations within PathEngine are all made through an allocation mechanism that allows allocations to be redirected to a custom allocator provided by the calling application.

Custom allocators can be set passing an allocator pointer in to DLLExport_Init, in the case of DLL linkage, or by calling PathEngine_SetDefaultAllocator, in the case of linkage with PathEngine as a static library.

This can be used for:

• Specifying custom memory allocation strategies for use by PathEngine
• Measuring the amount of memory used by PathEngine, or statistics about the kinds of allocations made
• Verification that allocation counts return to zero across SDK initialisation and shutdown (i.e. no memory leaks)
• Integrating memory allocations in PathEngine with an application wide standard memory allocation strategy

The 'MemoryBenchmark' example project shows a working example of this mechanism, with a custom allocator used in this case to record statistics about the amount of memory allocated.

Some example code for implementing PathEngine custom memory allocators can be found on the iAllocator API reference page.