To support your first point, I implemented Maged's lock-free allocator so we could compare against it (http://www.scott-a-s.com/files/michael.tar.gz), and I never got it working correctly on Itanium. I spent weeks trying to figure out what was wrong. I eventually concluded that I did not understand the Itanium architecture and the algorithms used in the allocator well enough to be confident I could fix it - and that it wasn't worth improving my understanding of either. (I asked Maged if he had any experience with his allocator on Itanium, and he did not.)