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).
I'd happily see performance, latency and stability of your allocators in massively multithreaded, long-living programs with workloads where hundreds or thousands of parallel threads continuously create and destroy short-lived small and medium objects.
Writing allocators for domain-specific access patterns is easy. Writing a general-purpose high performing, stable allocator with bounded P99 latency is hard.
Give your friend, Dunning–Kruger, some better pills to keep him from speaking through you.
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.
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
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
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).
Your experience writing memory allocators is irrelevant. The point is that jemalloc is widely used and that’s why it makes sense to be aware of it.
I'd happily see performance, latency and stability of your allocators in massively multithreaded, long-living programs with workloads where hundreds or thousands of parallel threads continuously create and destroy short-lived small and medium objects.
Writing allocators for domain-specific access patterns is easy. Writing a general-purpose high performing, stable allocator with bounded P99 latency is hard.
Give your friend, Dunning–Kruger, some better pills to keep him from speaking through you.
For some context on why this release is notable: Jemalloc Postmortem [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264958