Hacker News Reader

well one of the stated goals of musl is to be simple and correct, and all those mallocs are anything but simple

That's true for jemalloc, but mimalloc is pretty simple. The reference paper is pretty short and really accessible and IIRC the implementation is around 5klocs. I doubt musl's implementation would much simpler than this.

5kloc is about 10x larger than musl's existing (old) malloc in source lines. I suspect lots of that is low code density, comments, etc.

I have to lookup what exactly mimalloc is/does every time someone mentions it, because the readme/documentation isn't very descriptive except discussing extensions outside the normal API. I didn't have time to dig through this again today. But I did look at it in some depth on several occasions in the past and it really wasn't suitable for or comparable to what we're doing in musl.

Thanks for clarification, didn't imagine that musl's malloc was that minimalist.

You should definitely have a look at the paper [1] it's only ten page long! (Excluding benchmarks and references)

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com