Comment by markisus

Yeah if your program has a natural notion of a "frame" (eg most video games), you can do memory management by simply incrementing an integer (bump allocation). At the end of your frame, you reset the integer to zero. You can't really get any faster than that.

An additional benefit of this style of allocation over malloc/free is that you can get a lot of the same type of objects contiguous in memory so that iteration over them is a lot faster because there are fewer cache misses.