[tedkalaw]

at UIUC, there's a project in the systems class (CS241) that is exactly this. there's a leaderboard with projects and how it compares to the system malloc for a variety of metrics

this is definitely one of the best projects i ever did in school and a great coming of age project. worst case, there's always an implementation at the back of K&R ;)

[kjdal2001]

I agree. That assignment was one of my favorites. It was a lot of fun because it was fairly easy to get something that functioned, and as you came up with ideas for making it better (or just got ideas from reference implementations), you could watch your metrics get better or worse.

[codr4life]

Exactly the experience I'm trying to provide with the challenge. For the price of forking the repository you get a framework for trying out and comparing your own allocation strategies.