Re: When should ralloc.c be used? (WAS: bug#24358)

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>   > I don't like it either, but would rather work on redoing the build process 
> so
>   > that we can use the native malloc on all hosts.
>
> That may not be desirable, though.  We started using GNU malloc
> because it gave much better performance

We could continue to do that, on the set of platforms where our copy of GNU 
malloc works significantly better than native malloc. My impression, though, is 
that this set of platforms is gradually shrinking due to improvements in memory 
allocators. See, e.g.:

Berger ED, Zorn BG, McKinley KS. Reconsidering custom memory allocation. 
OOPSLA'02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2502508.2502522
https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/berger-oopsla2002.pdf