Parsers don't usually need to hold onto what they're parsing for a very long time, so unless they were running this parallel on a machine with 4k cores, I'd imagine it would be much more likely that a buffer overrun hits the middle of an already-freed allocation rather than going into an active one.

In terms of "wasting" memory, perhaps the kernel could detect that you are writing 0s to a COW 0 page and still not actually tie the page to physical RAM. (If you're overwriting non-0 data, well it's already in a physical page.)

I don't quite follow the details of the CPU cache issue and why that is more-than-minor.

I do think in this day and age we should be re-visiting this question seriously in our C standard libraries. If the performance issues are actually major problems for specific systems, the old behaviour could be kept, but after benchmarking to show that it really is a performance problem.