Trading Throughput for Determinism: How PMAD Rethinks Memory Allocation

Traditional memory allocators optimize for median performance while accepting terrible worst cases—a single malloc call occasionally taking 7ms that destroys real-time applications. PMAD eliminates this trade-off by removing the slow path entirely, achieving O(1) bounded allocation with predictable latency by design. This represents a philosophical shift recognizing that in latency-sensitive systems, worst-case guarantees often outweigh raw throughput.