[yoklov]

IME most of it is due to how bad c++'s builtin allocator support is though. C++11 helps a little but a lot of stuff you might want to do seemed to be impossible last time I looked. This is awful since games will often use pools and arenas, often heavily.

Part of it is also for cross-platform consistency. No chance for bugs caused by using a different stdlib, etc. This is worth it when a lot of the toolchains for consoles are arcane have the chicken/egg-ish problem of often having poor stl implementations since they expect everybody to implement their own.

I've been out of game dev for a while though. These days I'd expect using the C++ stdlib to be more common, and mallocs are faster now (although even if you're bundling e.g. jemalloc, I imagine you still get a substantial benefit from using pools or arenas in many cases).