alt Hacker NewsI'm not defending anything, I'm saying it's usually trivial to make allocation time marginal.
+ every application doing manual memory pools
Usually it's simple data structures in flat memory.
If allocation is taking all the time, that's a poorly optimized program with lots of low hanging fruit and a different allocator is not the right fix. It's like having a boat with a hole in the bottom and someone says the solution is a smaller hole.
But TCmalloc / jemalloc are 21-22 years old, respectively, and jemalloc has been the FreeBSD (released) default malloc implementation for the last 18.
jemalloc is also possibly bigger than all of musl. If it was a problem after optimization I would use it and I have in the past, it's just nowhere near as important as minimizing allocations in the first place. OpenBSD uses straight mmap.
There's also a reason this stuff started getting adopted around 20 years ago (I'll add macOS to the pile: it added per-CPU malloc sharding in 2008). It's not just due to overall growth in OS complexity. It's because that's when multicore CPUs were taking off. Before that, the cost of a global lock was far lower.
OpenBSD is straight unconcerned about performance. That's their choice.