A million, perhaps. But you're talking about adding one instruction to every single data access. Plus your code bloats up with all those extra dec instructions. BCPL and C were created for departmental and lab computers like the pdp-9.

Note, for example that the mighty 6502 succeeded in the market because its designers had heard from customers that the $100 price for the 6800 was too much, so they removed some instructions and addressing modes to get the die small enough that it could be sold for $20.

> But you're talking about adding one instruction to every single data access.

No, you misunderstood. You subtract one from the pointer at allocation time. You don’t add an instruction every time you access.

And even if it was an instruction for every access, memory access is much more expensive than and add (at least nowadays -- I don't know if that's always been true).

Similarly I like to think about it as the add/subtract instruction is very small compared to malloc (and maybe could be included in a custom allocator for free). So the one extra instruction will always be somewhere between relatively minor to negligible and unnoticed.

Yeah today memory access on a cache miss is really expensive. I think memory was normally running at a different clock rate than the CPU even 50-60 years ago, so has always been something where you can’t touch memory every instruction. The latency of a cache miss wasn’t nearly as bad in the past. When the data cache was invented, a main memory access was like 4 times slower than register access. Today, main memory access can be more than a hundred time slower, sometimes it can approach a thousand times slower, which is why we always have multi-level caches now. And memory latency is still getting worse. If someone figured out how to make memory faster without increasing the cost or the energy consumption, they’d be rich! ;)