Re:What is malloc doing, anyway?
by SkiFire13 on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:36PM
(#50430641)
> the complexity and over-head of the malloc abstraction is precisely what made me very intrigued by "stack-only" languages, such a recently published Goose.
Goose's stacks have quite some complexity themselves. They preallocate a ton of memory. The compiler has to magically match your code to each stack. You are not allowed to have nested growing types (e.g. creating an adjacency list is not so easy). And after all for some usecases you still end up using an allocator (Goose's linked list example ends up building a pool allocator for the linked list nodes!)
Goose's stacks have quite some complexity themselves. They preallocate a ton of memory. The compiler has to magically match your code to each stack. You are not allowed to have nested growing types (e.g. creating an adjacency list is not so easy). And after all for some usecases you still end up using an allocator (Goose's linked list example ends up building a pool allocator for the linked list nodes!)