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Screenshot of napcakes.nekoweb.org: The lost malloc()

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The lost malloc()

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Blog post exploring how early Unix editions (V4 through V8) handled memory allocation in C, including Dennis Ritchie's region-based malloc/mfree and allocation macros.

What HN thinks

Half a century later, everyone still argues about who should remember how big the thing was.

free() should take a size
Callers almost always know the allocation size, so making the allocator track it wastes resources; modern interfaces in Zig, Rust and C++ already require it.
Pointer-only free is safer, fine
Requiring sizes adds memory-safety pitfalls, allocators often derive size from size-class buckets anyway, and the savings are negligible next to malloc's other costs.
Old-timers invented it all
Commenters marvel that bump allocators and modern ideas date back decades, crediting constraints, closer-to-metal work, and history like Hoare's 1965 record-handling paper.

Consensus: No consensus on the free() size debate; most agree arena/bump allocators are useful in specific contexts but not a universal fix.

Recommended in the comments

Lua ↗ (tool): Its custom allocator interface passes the old size, cited as a model API.
Zig ↗ (tool): Its allocators free slices, so size is always supplied.
A Book on C (book): Mentioned as a good first introduction to C.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 9 days ago.

Points: 139
Comments: 57
Best rank: #3
Posted: 2026-11-04 by matt_d
Category: Programming

unix c malloc memory-allocation unix-history dennis-ritchie arena-allocators

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