[bodhiandphysics]

Lots of programs malloc a lot of memory, and do nothing with it for a while. This allows the os to wait for a low load time to handle memory allocation.

[pm215]

Is there much benefit from delaying the zeroing to first-write rather than first-read (which I think is effectively where Linux does it)?

[astrange]

I think the article is just incorrect and every system uses allocation on first read.

[bodhiandphysics]

Probably not... but both ways are fine.