Java Memory Allocation Myths

IBM developerWorks has a great article about modern JVM memory allocation performance. While early versions of the JVM were notoriously slow, the 1.4.2 HotSpot VM new Object() code path is faster than even the best C malloc implementations. J2SE 6 has support for escape analysis, which is an interesting technique for optimizing memory allocation by detecting objects that can be allocated on the stack or even in registers.