Comment by jeffbee
2 days ago
For an example of why an allocator is a maintenance treadmill, consider that C++ recently (relatively) added sized delete, and Linux recently gained transparent huge pages.
2 days ago
For an example of why an allocator is a maintenance treadmill, consider that C++ recently (relatively) added sized delete, and Linux recently gained transparent huge pages.
It's been 14 years since THP got added to the kernel[1], surely we're past calling that "recent" :)
https://www.kernelconfig.io/config_transparent_hugepage
> In particular, the seeds for principled huge page allocation (HPA) were sown way back in 2016! HPA work continued apace for several years, slowed, then stagnated as tweaks piled on top of each other without the requisite refactoring that keeps a codebase healthy. This feature trajectory recently cratered.
But if they'd declared the allocators "done" 15 years ago, then you wouldn't have it.
Another example is rseq (which was originally implemented for tcmalloc).