What's the incentive? Credits? Give me a break. It's fairly easy to beat the given examples but in the end heap management is heavily dependent on application,

What's the incentive? Credits? Give me a break. It's fairly easy to beat the given examples but in the end heap management is heavily dependent on application, client code, platform, hardware and many other criteria. It's a very complex problem space and what matters here is how existing important code behaves and continues to behave given that existing code has most likely made assumptions how the heap is managed. glibc is a good example of a perfectly fine compromise not optimized for any particular use case. Anyone who has had performance issues with it has most likely already implemented their own solution for their problem set. It might much more worthwhile to develop a set of malloc like implementations a developer can chose from instead of going for a fits all approach.