A pool allocator is great, so long as the lifetime of the pool meshes well with the allocations out of it. But the larger your application, the less likely that's going to be true. Different libraries will do their own allocations, and it's often hard to pass the right pool through enough layers of abstraction to be sure that e.g. that string got allocated in the right pool for where it's going to get plugged in when it comes back.
I'm not saying you're advocating C over GC'd languages. I'm specifically disagreeing with the idea that in practice, in large applications written in C, that the application author actually has discretion over allocation policy. I'm saying that you couldn't in practice use a pool allocator much of the time, even if you wanted to, unless your application is very self-contained.
The Delphi compiler I work on is written in C and uses pool allocators to great effect. There's a heap allocator which can be marked and shrunk, there's a pool for every unit, there's a pool for expressions, there's a pool for constants, etc. You've got to keep track of what got allocated where, make sure you don't pollute one pool with references to another, and sometimes do a bunch of copying to ensure that. Pooled allocation isn't a panacea, even for something as self-contained as a compiler, albeit a compiler which can be hosted by the IDE, so it needs to be long-lived, manage memory across debugging sessions, multiple compiles, etc.
This is like saying "there will always be some code you can't optimize, so this optimization doesn't matter". I know you know that isn't true.
Real library code either owns object lifetimes (and can use pools internally because the library's own _release() function is the only thing that can free its state), or keeps its hands completely off allocation. The few counterexamples, where for instance a library malloc()'s something and expects you to free it, tend to be notorious examples of error-prone and evil interfaces.
Meanwhile, just because everything isn't amenable to pool allocation (or, even better, arena allocation, where there is zero memory management overhead at all ever) doesn't mean you don't win huge on the places that are amenable.
You are raising the boogeyman of a hypothetical library that is going to take a pointer that I pool allocated and call free() on it, blowing up the program. I assert that any real example of such a library is going to be easy to shoot down as "an incredibly crappy library".
That's a complete straw man, and you know it. I'm saying that the specific optimization you mentioned is hard if you don't control all the pieces.
The primary advantage of a pooled allocator isn't in allocation - though that's nice - it's that you don't have the cost of iterating through each object to free it. But if you have external libraries, they'll abstract their allocations into handles (say), and now you have the problem of running what amount to destructors.
Nope, I don't think it is. I'm saying that when libraries track their own state and manage their own lifecycles, you're right, you can't make them use pool allocators (unless it's worth it to you to do surgery)... but that doesn't keep you from using pools on your own state.
I think people also overestimate the extent to which C programs depend on third-party libraries for their own statekeeping.
And again... what are we talking about here? I'm not advocating writing things in C. I'm saying, it's bogus to say that since code tends to be I/O bound, C isn't a performance win for most programs. That is simply a bogus argument. That the level of performance you can get out of C is usually not worth the investment is neither here nor there. Again: Ruby programmer here.
Again, I'm not saying that you're advocating writing things in C.
Where I think performance advantages that come out of writing things in C come from is being rarely being able to take shortcuts by relying on provided libraries and primitives which turn out to be not quite tweaked for the problem at hand. That is, C forces you to do so much yourself - largely because it has such poor abstraction tools - that you end up with a more specialized codebase. That specialization can include cache-oriented optimization, but I don't think it's the most important aspect or unique to C such that you can't get 95% of it - to the point where it's no longer a meaningful advantage - in a GC'd language.
I'm not saying you're advocating C over GC'd languages. I'm specifically disagreeing with the idea that in practice, in large applications written in C, that the application author actually has discretion over allocation policy. I'm saying that you couldn't in practice use a pool allocator much of the time, even if you wanted to, unless your application is very self-contained.
The Delphi compiler I work on is written in C and uses pool allocators to great effect. There's a heap allocator which can be marked and shrunk, there's a pool for every unit, there's a pool for expressions, there's a pool for constants, etc. You've got to keep track of what got allocated where, make sure you don't pollute one pool with references to another, and sometimes do a bunch of copying to ensure that. Pooled allocation isn't a panacea, even for something as self-contained as a compiler, albeit a compiler which can be hosted by the IDE, so it needs to be long-lived, manage memory across debugging sessions, multiple compiles, etc.