4 ms·
Why is this on the HN front page? Is there something particularly noteworthy about this release?
by ZenoArrow 17d ago
Why is this on the HN front page? Is there something particularly noteworthy about this release?
- gjvc 17d agobecause people like you are too busy whining about it to put up something more interesting
- aktenlage 17d agoThey resumed development on jemalloc only recently, after years of no releases.
- charcircuit 17d agoDevelopment was never stopped for jemalloc. This is a common misconception. There just were not releases being tagged and packaged against the ongoing development.
- ck45 17d agoI 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
- defrost 17d agoThe 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715318
- baq 17d agojemalloc is something you should be aware of if you do software for a living
- rfgplk 17d agoWhy? 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 17d agoYour 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.
- HackerThemAll 17d agoI'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.
- Pannoniae 17d agoYou're correct, but his point is that you don't need to solve the generic problem. Solving the generic problem is very hard. Grug doesn't like solving hard problem. What does grug do? Solve five easy problems. Make an arena for the short-lived objects, reuse the objects, use generic multithreaded malloc for the rest. Grug happy.
- matheusmoreira 17d agoNot everything needs to be general purpose. Allocation can be as easy as bumping a pointer, and it's hard to beat that.
- cv5005 17d ago>where hundreds or thousands of parallel threads continuously create and destroy short-lived small and medium objects. Should one even want a global, general purpose heap allocator for that? Seems like a crazy idea to even consider.
- stackghost 17d agoIn 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?
- iam-da-author 17d agoTL;DR: Because the runtime of most GC:d languages uses malloc for its internal data structures. I work for the runtime team of JPG @ Oracle. We use malloc in Hotspot, quite a lot actually! Providing your JVM with a good malloc can improve the performance of the runtime, both in terms of CPU and memory, by quite a bit. I don't think you need the details, but it's good to be aware that some mallocs are better than others, and there are multiple of them. Being aware of jemalloc is a good way of being aware of the facts I just mentioned :-).
- stackghost 16d agoThe vast majority of professional developers are not in a position where they can just swap out allocators willy-nilly. They take what they get, and write the code they're assigned to write on the platform the CTO or their product lead or whoever has decided upon.
- iam-da-author 16d agoOkay, well, I guess all I can say is that if you strive to be one of the developers who do get the chance to care about this stuff, then you should know this stuff :-).
- xxs 17d ago>...the vast majority of software was written in garbage collected language and even then recently it costed (us) quite a few months to blame JVM and later the default glibc memory allocator for running out native (not java heap memory) - had to exclude all possible native libs (zlib, zstd via jna), direct buffers, sockets, thread stacks and so on. Changing the malloc to jemalloc solved the issue, even though initially it was done for its debugging capabilities. It's just a great memory allocator.
- imhoguy 17d agoI 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 17d agoUpvoted for the same reason. We would not be able to run our workloads without Jemalloc. Kudos to this awesome piece of software.
- smartmic 17d agoYou 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 …
- kreco 17d ago> Why is this on the HN front page? This question was not necessary. You know the answer, because people upvoted this.