(Salvatore Sanfillipo is one of the top C hackers and system designers in the world right now, imo. Period.) 1) Everyone and their mommy is writing a memory manager -- it's the thing to do ;-) That said, JVM is not "wrapping" malloc. The memory manager is tasked with garbage collection. malloc() is just a part of the equation. (Also see jmalloc) "intelligent design"? You'll find this of interest: http://marakana.com/s/tuning_jvm_for_a_vm_lessons_learned_di... 2) JVM does an excellent job, but once past 4GiB heaps, GC's period runs can get unacceptably long. Thus BigMemory, Oracle Coherence, etc. Azul Systems, however, has a kick ass JVM with GC written by the master, Cliff Click, that can scale to insanely huge heaps. The issue with malloc, imho, is that the kernel is entirely clueless about the semantics of the data. Pointer chasing and temporal locality only gets you so far. Servers these days generate an incredible amount of garbage; cache coherence on multi-core is expensive, and there is very little communication between the kernel and user land process about the semantics of the memory objects. Thus, most just mmap a chunk of memory and manage the memory themselves. (c.f. Antirez above.)