Hacker News Reader

The blog post sadly doesn't cover what alternatives are out there, and why they settled on their choice.

Besides tcmalloc, there are jmalloc, hoard, the more recent mimalloc, a bunch of commercial options, ...

Would have been interesting to see a comparison.

Edit: background is in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013230

The best allocator for this kind of problem would of course be a compacting GC. First it would be much faster, it would be safer, and easier to use.

For my bigger libraries glibc malloc and free has insane runtimes. Eg a final free could last over 1 minute. If you see this with a GC you would throw it out immediately. But apparently people don't measure and spread false rumors about GC's. Even a very poor and primitive GC as in emacs is not that slow as glibc malloc/free. A good one is miles faster. My GC has an upper limit of 10ms, not minutes.

Do you think any of these stand a chance at replacing Doug Lea's malloc in glibc, or does dlmalloc provide more desirable behavior for the general case?

The FSF requires copyright assignment for code added to glibc, which creates an impediment to including code from other projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com