[bodyfour]

jemalloc's non-standard interface gives you some of what you want, expectially xallocx() http://www.canonware.com/download/jemalloc/jemalloc-latest/d...

There have been C++ templates written that use jemalloc-specific calls; for instance see Folly from facebook. I haven't taken a close look, but I know they do some jemalloc-specific code: https://github.com/facebook/folly/tree/master/folly

The other allocated-related thing that C++ really wants (and could benefit C as well) is "sized deallocation". Most of the time you often know the exact size of the memory you allocated. If you could pass that to free() the allocator could save some work determining it. In the case of C++ the compiler can often do this on your behalf for many "delete" calls (at least in the cases where it knows the exact type). Google did an implementation of this idea and got good results. They submitted a proposal to the standards body but I don't know if there is any recent activity. I hope it does happen though: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n353...

[plorkyeran]

Folly does take advantage of jemalloc to expand allocations in-place when possible, but afaik it doesn't do the more extreme optimization mentioned in the article where pages are moved to a different virtual address without actually paging into memory.

Sized deallocation made it into C++14.

[bodyfour]

Since 2.1, jemalloc does support using mremap to do large realloc()'s, although it seems to be off by default. You need "./configure --enable-mremap" to get it.

That's good news about sized deallocation, I hadn't noticed that there is an updated "N3778" proposal which apparently was accepted. I still haven't seen the dlmalloc work to support that show up in the main svn branch.