It is well past due time to revisit memory allocation from first principles. I recently finished my PhD on the topic, and realized that we have yet to agree on a consistent definition of fragmentation (see Wilson et al's seminal survey on "Dynamic Storage Allocation"), much less how to deal with it.

When I was in the trenches, I had constant cognitive dissonance against the fact that (i) "it's a solved problem" and (ii) low-to-no-malloc was often presented as a feature of low-level code.

My take is, train a SOTA deep learning system on solved static memory allocation instances (which is NP-complete already) and build a dynamic malloc on top.

To see where the static SOTA was a couple years ago, see this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04874

And also my general audience-friendly presentation of it: https://cappadokes.github.io/jekyll/update/2025/07/16/welcom...

Disclaimer: I've moved on past academia and I may have missed one or two breakthroughs. But the older the problem, the higher the probability of it staying open.