You could, but it's fairly uncommon to do that kind of "custom allocator" style in C, especially in traditional Unix utility programming. It seems to be more of

You could, but it's fairly uncommon to do that kind of "custom allocator" style in C, especially in traditional Unix utility programming. It seems to be more of a C++ thing culturally in my experience, though you do find it in C in "big" programs, like scientific-computing code.