In embedded environments memory can be a critical driver of the design of data structures and containers. Computing resources have been expanding steadily each year but there are still a wide range of systems with far less than a megabyte of memory. On systems with tens of kilobytes of memory, structures are often designed to be compact to maximize data density. Rather than splurging on memory aligned elements that would be faster for the processor to access, a developer will typically use types with minimal sizes based on the known range of values that the element is intending to hold. Fixed sized buffers At my day job a fixed size pool of messages was implemented to hold message data. While this achieved one design goal of using statically allocated buffers, avoiding dynamic allocations that might fail at runtime, it isn't efficient if there is a wide range of message sizes. It isn't efficient because each message uses a message buffer. With small message sizes the buff...