alt Hacker NewsI don't know about more error prone. Benchmarks completely aside, freeing a batch of stuff you've allocated in a single place makes it easier to manage memory. I think it should be preferred wherever it's an option for that reason most of all. The "killer app" is something like an arena allocator that lives for the duration of an HTTP request.
I respectfully disagree. The technique has its place, and I use it once in a while, but whether it makes a positive difference for performance is highly sensitive to a number of factors.
For example, bump style allocators allocate very quickly, but at the cost of higher memory usage and therefore sometimes worse cache locality.
The only way to know is to actually measure.