Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Jemalloc 5.4.0 (github.com)

117 points by gkfasdfasdf 5 hours ago

vocx2tx 3 hours ago

For some context on why this release is notable: Jemalloc Postmortem [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264958

lordnacho an hour ago

I always wondered, is it French? "Je m'alloc du memory"

sam_lowry_ an hour ago

Rather a tradition to call a malloc by the initials of the implementer: Jason Evans malloc (jemalloc), Poul-Henning Kamp malloc (phkmalloc), Doug Lea (dlmalloc).

P.S. I also wondered whether systemd had any cultural reference to Système D aka Système Débrouillard, but Pottering does not seem to be someone engaging in word play, so probably not.

tefkah 32 minutes ago

damn i always thought it was a french thing, this is blowing my mind

eliaspro a minute ago

simonask an hour ago

Thanks, now my brain will forever read it like that. I'm not even a little bit French.

ksec an hour ago

Ok. Why both the homepage and its Github repo doesn't make a single mention of Jason Evans? I know he stepped down but surely it is at least worst mentioning it?

Is Meta still using it and developing it? If not who are the driving force behind it now? I just checked there wasn't a release since 2022 and then we have this now. Something changed?

Just wish we have a little bit of context. But it is also great it is continue being maintained. It makes a huge difference for Ruby on Rails Apps.

aktenlage an hour ago

> Just wish we have a little bit of context

See the comment of vocx2tx

feldrim 22 minutes ago

It's only mentioned in history: https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc/wiki/Background#history

skavi 24 minutes ago

does anyone familiar with the art have thoughts on why only tcmalloc switched from thread caches to cpu caches? would it make linux behavior diverge too much from other platforms?

ZenoArrow 3 hours ago

Why is this on the HN front page? Is there something particularly noteworthy about this release?

imhoguy an hour ago

I upvoted it because I benefit from jemalloc in my stack (RoR) and I am tired of AI taking over HN front page. Let the hacker spirit be back!

adityapatadia 27 minutes ago

Upvoted for the same reason. We would not be able to run our workloads without Jemalloc. Kudos to this awesome piece of software.

smartmic 16 minutes ago

You are not alone - my first thought was 'oh, HN is trying to bring back the disappointed hackers'. All this AI hype over every little model update fart is so exhausting and boring …

aktenlage 3 hours ago

They resumed development on jemalloc only recently, after years of no releases.

charcircuit 39 minutes ago

Development was never stopped for jemalloc. This is a common misconception. There just were not releases being tagged and packaged against the ongoing development.

defrost 3 hours ago

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

ck45 3 hours ago

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

baq 2 hours ago

jemalloc is something you should be aware of if you do software for a living

stackghost an hour ago

In the Before Times, the vast majority of software was written in garbage collected language where a working knowledge of the relative merits of C memory allocators is not useful or particularly relevant.

Why would the scads of people writing JavaScript, Java, python, go, rails, etc need to be aware of jemalloc?

nh2 8 minutes ago

xxs 27 minutes ago

iam-da-author an hour ago

rfgplk 2 hours ago

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).

groomlake 2 hours ago

stackghost 2 hours ago

HackerThemAll 2 hours ago

gjvc 14 minutes ago

because people like you are too busy whining about it to put up something more interesting