[asveikau]

I think it becomes an application specific or domain specific thing.

For example, I've done some work with audio or video. Nobody working on that goes straight to malloc on every packet or frame. It'd just be asking for pain.

But a general purpose allocator doing its own free-list on the assumption that libc is going to suck? I think that's outdated. If you do want to support it, I think it's better to allow the caller to replace the allocator through a function pointer, rather than just do it by default in a library.

[TingPing]

glib does not always use one, the default is normal malloc and it provides another allocator api as an option.

[asveikau]

Yes, I figured that out from other posts on this thread (including one where I looked at g_malloc source).

I think libstc++ on the other hand does or did have such a cache as an always-on thing though. So not unheard of.