alt Hacker NewsActually yes, the malloc/free API (inherited from the ALLOCATE and FREE statements of PL/I) is too simple.
The metadata that malloc always attaches to the allocated memory would normally be useful for the user (i.e. having access to values like the currently allocated size and the total size of the allocation).
Very frequently, the user must duplicate inside the allocated memory the same information that already exists in the metadata, wasting memory. Also time may be wasted with requests for reallocation, instead of just adjusting the currently allocated size, when this is sufficient.
With a better API, the metadata would have been visible for the user. Being hidden from the user is not a protection in a language like C, where using pointer arithmetic can trash any memory location. Being exposed as non-mutable would have been a better protection.
Moreover, a better metadata structure for malloc should have always included a reference count, to be handled automatically by the compiler, and the malloc/free functions should have been invoked only implicitly, never explicitly.
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Efficient and generalized are opposing forces. Malloc is fine for what it is but you can do better by specialising.
To play devil's advocate, the problem with exposing more info is you limit the allocator design space.
1) If the app knew about and could use the additional underlying capacity, memory checkers wouldn't be able to find small overflows
2) Calling realloc instead of knowing existing capacity doesn't really provide better performance, at least not asymptotically.
3) If you need to know the requested allocation size, usually its for a dynamic array. Constantly requesting the size from the allocator would often have horrible performance if the size wasn't stored in adjacent metadata, but instead required a lookup operation, as is the case with hardened allocators. In practice hardened allocators probably wouldn't be a thing, or alternatively it would be idiomatic to store the size separately anyhow.
4) Reference counts would impose significant space and layout limitations despite most allocations never needing it.
There's another group who would argue the allocator should require passing the size and alignment to the free function, so allocators can be optimized better. Most of the time this is known statically. I think C2y will add APIs like this, though there's also a proposal to standardize an interface to query allocation capacity. Altogether I wouldn't be surprised if someday people appreciated the balance struck by malloc/free/realloc, especially as a minimal interface for overlaying application-specific allocators or injecting instrumentation. It has a certain elegance, in the sense of nothing left to remove.