Comment by pizlonator

My data says that perf of malloc/free in actual programs (not fake ass shit calling malloc in a loop) is never affected by the call overhead. Not by dynamic call overhead, not even if you write a wrapper that uses a switch or indirect call to select mallocs. Reason is simple: malloc perf is all about data dependencies in the malloc/free path and how many cache misses it causes or prevents. Adding indirection on the malloc call path is handled gracefully by the CPU’s ability to ILP, and malloc is a perfect candidate since it’s bottlenecks will be cache misses inside the malloc/free paths.