Yup, a hidden assumption that I didn't state is that 'n' is modest and of course 'log n' is very modest. For example, n = 256 might be the case on a microcontr

Yup, a hidden assumption that I didn't state is that 'n' is modest and of course 'log n' is very modest. For example, n = 256 might be the case on a microcontroller doing realtime activities. proving you never exhaust the heap is probably harder than proving your allocator never takes more than X ns, once you've decided to do runtime allocation on your embedded RTOS.