Bump Allocator

Implementing a bump allocator in C++

This medium-difficulty coding problem tests whether you understand the design and implementation of a linear allocator—a stripped-down memory management strategy used in performance-critical systems like game engines, request handlers, and compilers. It probes both your grasp of pointer arithmetic and your ability to reason about the lifetime of allocated memory.

The core challenge is to maintain a single advancing pointer into a fixed buffer, hand out non-overlapping regions on demand, and handle the boundary cases correctly: what happens when the buffer is exhausted, how do you track available space, and what guarantees must hold across allocate, deallocate, and reset. A clean solution keeps state minimal and makes the invariants explicit.

• Pointer arithmetic and buffer layout
• Exception safety and atomic state transitions
• The semantics of a no-op deallocate
• Capacity tracking and overflow detection