Why? Writing a memory allocator is quite simple, and I'd argue that _everyone_ should write one from scratch for any kind of high performance application. It's also trivial to outperform general purpose allocators that have to satisfy countless constraints. I've written numerous special purpose mallocs that are a) both provably (formally) safer than the standard armada and b) significantly faster (>10x throughput).
For some context on why this release is notable: Jemalloc Postmortem [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264958
Why is this on the HN front page? Is there something particularly noteworthy about this release?
They resumed development on jemalloc only recently, after years of no releases.
The noted resumption and likely a small amount of halo effect from the Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms thread two / three days ago.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715318
I just checked whether it's the first release after Jason Evans stepped down as maintainer, but it isn't. That was the previous release, 5.3.1
jemalloc is something you should be aware of if you do software for a living
Why? Writing a memory allocator is quite simple, and I'd argue that _everyone_ should write one from scratch for any kind of high performance application. It's also trivial to outperform general purpose allocators that have to satisfy countless constraints. I've written numerous special purpose mallocs that are a) both provably (formally) safer than the standard armada and b) significantly faster (>10x throughput).
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