Question

I tried to implement this:

namespace Test
{
    void* operator new(size_t s)
    {
        return malloc(s);
    }
}

But g++ (4.3.1) says:

void* Test::operator new(size_t)’ may not be declared within a namespace

Am I doing something wrong?

If yes, is there anyway to overload the operator new to be used in my classes? I do not want to create a base class and make all my classes inherit from such base class.

Answer 1

You can only (re-)define operator new as a member of the global namespace or as (an implicitly static) member of a class.

If you don’t have a common base class then you need to define operator new for each class that you want a specialized implementation for. You could, of course, delegate to a common global function.