New malloc ready, take 42

[Jason Evans]

On Dec 26, 2005, at 2:18 AM, Max Khon wrote:
>
> Do you plan to provide public API for malloc arenas
> similar to SGI amalloc(3)?
>
> http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi? 
> coll=0650&db=man&fname=/usr/share/catman/p_man/cat3p/amallinfo.z

I hadn't planned to do so.  It's not too hard to think of scenarios  
in which manual management of arenas might be useful, but adding non- 
standard public APIs to libc is something that I'm reluctant to do  
unless there is a compelling reason to do so.  Arena-specific APIs  
would work well with jemalloc, but they may not make sense for  
whatever comes after jemalloc, yet we'd be stuck with supporting the  
APIs.

In fact, if I were making API changes to non-standard libc  
interfaces, the first thing I'd do would be to remove reallocf(3), or  
at least rename it to reallocf_np().

Are there compelling use cases you can think of that might sway us  
toward providing malloc arena APIs?

Thanks,
Jason