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On first seeing this I wasn't sure what analogy the author was trying to make. After reading the article my best guess is that they are simply trying to say that, writing an allocator is easier than it seems on the surface.

Though it's not clear to me that the article does a good job of establishing that this is actually true ("mimalloc is only a few thousand lines of code" doesn't pass the smell test).

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Yeah, re: the title, the URL/path string "allocators-are-for-monkeys-with-typewriters" (including on the page) seems more clear about that "less hard than you'd think" thing than the larger-font published headline "Allocators are Monkeys With Typewriters". And of course the quote in the article is even more specific "given enough time, even a monkey with a typewriter can write a memory allocator".

I generally agree with the "memory management doesn't have to be as complicated as you might think" vibe, especially if you've read about some optimizations in fancy modern GCs and aren't aware of what a basic simple non-GC world can look like. That said, of course, you can indeed get into a lot of complexity beyond the textbook 101 examples. Like the mentioned threading...

We replaced the title with a more representative sentence from the article body.

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