Oh, I totally agree. Being afraid to call out to the allocator because "hey, I might need that memory later" is kinda not great. To a certain extent I can see how if an application tends to thrash memory, making a kajillion syscalls might hurt performance, enough that on many machines the gains from doing a single big allocation on the system and then slicing it up into small allocations in-process might outweigh the downsides, but still...