If you can convince the caller to keep track of that metadata themselves you obviously don’t need to. That can be important.
Something I noticed is that _very often_ the code that is calling malloc(n) is keeping track of n somehow for its own reasons (bounds checking, grow/gap pointers, etc) so merging the value halves stack churn and it’s an easy win.
If you can convince the caller to keep track of that metadata themselves you obviously don’t need to. That can be important.
Something I noticed is that _very often_ the code that is calling malloc(n) is keeping track of n somehow for its own reasons (bounds checking, grow/gap pointers, etc) so merging the value halves stack churn and it’s an easy win.