I remember a long time ago using the apache portable runtime and pool malloc was pretty interesting. I believe it probably was designed around web requests - which could disappear at any time. The idea was that you allocated a memory pool, and did all your mallocs within that pool. If there was a problem, you could easily clean up and free the entire pool.

I think this idea could work really well the the memory system - a pool could be a number of underlying pages and gc would be easy, and letting go of the pages would be too.