I'd say it was probably the optimal solution, allowing them to scale more or less gracefully. It might not be the most elegant, but it definitely works, and at

I'd say it was probably the optimal solution, allowing them to scale more or less gracefully. It might not be the most elegant, but it definitely works, and at that scale it's an engineering feat. I get why people hate C, but once you get used to a couple of good libraries things get much easier - we're not in the 90s anymore and there's plenty to choose from, with some of them having excellent quality code. And especially in cases like these when it turns out you can get some benefits from delayed freeing of memory C's manual memory management is an asset.