title: a library forces global overloads of new/delete on me!
body: <p>I'm maintaining a plugin (implemented as a dll) for a big closed source application. This has been working fine for years. However, with the latest update to it's SDK the vendor overloaded global operators new and delete. This causes lots of trouble for me. What happens is that my plugin allocates a string. I pass this string into a statically linked library which modifies it (changes it's length thus reallocating it). My application crashes.</p>
  
  <p>The reason is of course, that the string lives on the vendor allocated custom heap. The statically linked library knows nothing about this heap and tries to use the default new/delete operators on that memory. Boom.</p>
  
  <p>Now the question is: how can I keep my code clean and avoid using the vendor's operators? There is no conditional preprocessor macro. I can not avoid including the offending header since it contains 2000 lines more code I need for the plugin. I cannot pass the provided allocator into the other library since it does not provide any mechanisms for that. I have already bugged the vendor about it. I don't know what else I could try? </p>
  
  <p><strong>Addendum:</strong> After some heated debate I have managed to convince the vendor to remove the overloads again from the next version of the SDK. I have solved my immediate problem by simply hacking the current SDK and removing the overloads manually. Thanks for all the suggestions in this thread. They served as arguments and further "proof" of why the overloads were a bad idea in the first place.</p>