Re: Aligned blocks management: obsolete?

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 12/12/11 06:07, Dmitry Antipov wrote:
> I suppose that any non-ancient glibc malloc
> doesn't require such a glitch in lisp_align_malloc any more

This sounds correct to me as well, though I can't cite
chapter and verse offhand.  Certainly the posix_memalign
implementation has mutated significantly since glibc 2.3.2
came out in 2003, and any performance measurements
based on 2.3.2 are suspect now.

More generally, if some cruft was put into alloc.c long ago
for performance reasons, and if we can no longer demonstrate
that the cruft improves performance significantly
on currently-used platforms, then surely it's OK to remove it
after the feature freeze is over.  Cruft like that has a real
maintenance cost, and there's no point keeping it
if it doesn't actually have a performance benefit.