And recently (in 2013, I forget about previous versions) the CRT began using the process heap, instead of having its own heap handle. So the malloc/new/std::allocator family is an even thinner wrapper around HeapAlloc in that sense.

(In 2015, we're introducing a little bit of extra trickery though. In std::allocator, we'll highly align large allocations to be friendly to autovectorization. This isn't done at the lower malloc/new levels because they don't get size information at deallocation time, but the std::allocator interface has always required that information even if it was previously ignored. IIRC this buys 15% or so, which makes the back-end devs drool. Our current magic number for "large" is 4 KB, so this basically never affects node-based containers, only stuff like big vectors.)