Well, that's great if you're writing for an embedded device. But if you're running on a desktop or server system, you have hundreds of megabytes, or even gigaby

Well, that's great if you're writing for an embedded device. But if you're running on a desktop or server system, you have hundreds of megabytes, or even gigabytes of RAM, and you're working on a multitasking machine, so you can't take it unless you need it, and to some extent, you are expected to take what you need to get your job done: MS Word doesn't decide to die if your doc grows beyond 6 pages, and Apache can't just drop requests because it hit a hard limit far below what the system is capable of. Malloc may suck, but you HAVE to use it.