Nice! At CMU, we have 15-213, an introductory course on computer systems and one of the hardest/fun assignments is implementing malloc. We end up using seglists, mini-blocks and other optimizations, ending up with a faster implementation than the standard malloc itself on several benchmark tests.
I believe Bryant and O'Hallaron wrote a text book just for this course. You can always "optimize" it by reverse engineering the benchmark app and providing the correctly aligned blocks to the bench-marking application. It'll beat the standard malloc calls by several magnitudes if you were to do that.
This is one of the reasons why people write custom allocators - to suit a specific purpose where the allocation pattern is known well in advance.
I did that lab and I recall the professor saying “this will be the hardest code some of you have ever written.” I supposed thats true if its an intro course at CMU? Debugging was certainly mind numbing reading pages of hex to figure out where the bug is. I don’t think I ever did get realloc to pass all tests.
