> Warp wrote:
>> reason memory allocation speed is not something which has been optimized
>> to death in C(++) compilers, for whatever reasons 
> 
> I'm suspecting it's because C and C++ use pointers rather than 
> references, and can't carry around enough metadata (generally speaking) 
> to allow finding the pointers in a data structure, so they can't compact 
> memory. That means that finding free memory is generally a search.

Well, you can't move objects around in memory to compact, that is true. 
However, nothing stops a memory allocator from keeping lots of metadata 
internally to find free memory quickly.

How do filesystems know what empty blocks are available to save a new 
file? A linear search from the beginning of the disk?

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