The compiler cannot know the _purpose_ of your program, and thus cannot "figure out the optimal data layout". It's metaphysically not possible, let alone techni

The compiler cannot know the _purpose_ of your program, and thus cannot "figure out the optimal data layout". It's metaphysically not possible, let alone technically. Not everybody needs to worry about L2 or L3 most of the time, but if you are using a systems-level programming language where it might be of a concern to you at some point, it's extremely useful to be able to have that control. > expecting every programmer to call malloc and free in the right order The point of custom allocators is to not need to do the `malloc`/`free` style of memory allocation, and thus reduce the problems which that causes. And even if you do still need that style, Odin and many other languages offer features such as `defer` or even the memory tracking allocator to help you find the problems. Just like what was said in the article.