phk malloc, was (Re: ptmalloc2)

[Dan Melomedman]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     program that would benefit from it.  Not one.  The answer is:  libc
>     has no support for it because 99.9% of the programs that exist in this
>     world have no use for it and would not benefit from it.  If you want

I disagree with you about the benefits. If an email proxy will lose
messages because it can't make certain memory guarantees through the OS,
I can't use that OS with the email proxy in question.

>     total control over the backing store for a program's memory there is
>     nothing stopping you from writing your own malloc wrapper to wire the
>     memory or to use a file-backed mmap or something like that.
> 
>     The plain fact of the matter is that for any system where it matters,
>     the person running the program will set a datasize limit or the program
>     itself will be self-regulating.

In MessageWall the buffer size is user-configurable. The problem is the
OS just won't give that physical memory to MessageWall. People don't want to
possibly lose or delay email due to memory errors. It's just not acceptable.

So to summarize, the malloc feature I am looking for simply doesn't exist in
*BSD, and I should be looking elsewhere, or write a malloc replacement?