When I discussed the memory footprints of several C/C++ elements, I apparently missed a very important item: operator new and related functions. I assumed new shouldn't increase the binary that much, but boy was I wrong.

The short story is that officially new should throw an exception when it can't allocate new memory. Exceptions come with about 60 kb worth of baggage. Yes, this is more or less the same stuff that goes into vector and string.

The long story, including a detailed look at a minimal binary, a binary that uses new and a solution to the exception overhead (in this particular case anyway) can be read below the fold.