> No, a program that does pointer chasing and has to deallocate many small allocations is badly designed. If you are going to do that, using a GC language would be much better.

It is debatable whether using it is good or bad design, but at least the C++ std lib does offer a data structure which requires exactly this kind of deallocation: std::list and std::forward_list. And, given the cache characteristics of array VS linked list implementations, I would guess that most uses of std::list occur for huge lists that get written to often, as that seems to be the only case where the big-O advantage of list inster/delete would actually materialize into any performance benefit over a std::vector.