There's a huge depth to a good malloc() implementation. While you're wise to avoid it when your interests are focused on kernel development, I'd recommend every

There's a huge depth to a good malloc() implementation. While you're wise to avoid it when your interests are focused on kernel development, I'd recommend every programmer to have a go at writing malloc/free one day. Avoiding terrible performance problems is pretty tricky. At the very least, you'll gain a lot of respect for memory allocation and will discover that there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes when your code tries to allocate only a few bytes of memory.