[steveklabnik]

As always, it depends on a lot of details. A generational garbage collector can be made to allocate extremely quickly; IIRC for the JVM it's like, seven instructions? For short lived allocations, it sort of acts like an arena, which is very high performance. malloc/free need to be quite general.

It's always about details though. If a GC is faster than malloc/free, but your language doesn't tend to allocate much to begin with, the whole system can be faster even if malloc is slower. It always depends.

[geogriffin]

Doesn't something like jemalloc basically give you this, but without pauses? Thread-local freelists for quick recycling of small allocations without synchronization.. funnily enough, jemalloc even uses some garbage collection mechanisms internally.

[steveklabnik]

I don't know a ton about jemalloc internals, but it is true that a lot of modern mallocs use some mechanisms similar to GCs. There's some pretty major constraint differences though.