Game Development still revolves around this. For example when loading a level, it used to be you have huge arena, you load your "serialized" map at one end (say top), and your other chunks at the bottom - you have some "flexibility" to pop from top or bottom, so early on you arrange for that. Alternatively you split your memory per sized big chunks, and stream in out these (works well for textures, and primed sounds - e.g. the first 64kb or 128kb of a sound file).