Top 7 C++ malloc Projects

snmalloc

8 1,484 6.5 C++

Message passing based allocator

Project mention: Snmalloc: A Message Passing Allocator | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-10-11

https://github.com/microsoft/snmalloc#snmalloc mentions two biggest motivations as:
> Allocations on one thread are freed by a different thread
I can imagine one use-case for this: a task that is scheduled from and executed by a work-stealing thread-pool can allocate memory in one thread but by design there's no guarantee that the memory will be necessarily freed from that exact thread. Would that be a good use-case for snmalloc?
> Deallocations occur in large batches
This sounds much like a bump allocator use-case but which can do this exact thing by calling a single munmap(addr, len) and unmap multiple allocations all at once.

Hoard

1 1,051 4.2 C++

The Hoard Memory Allocator: A Fast, Scalable, and Memory-efficient Malloc for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
WorkOS

workos.com sponsored

The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Heap-Layers

2 369 4.4 C++

Heap Layers: An Extensible Memory Allocation Infrastructure
o1heap

4 215 1.7 C++

Constant-complexity deterministic memory allocator (heap) for hard real-time high-integrity embedded systems. There is very little activity because the project is finished and does not require further changes.
metamalloc

2 100 2.9 C++

Single header template based general purpose memory allocation library for Linux & Windows. Repo also provides a live http memory profiler as a separate single-header with no dependencies

Project mention: Metamalloc: Single-header template based general purpose memory allocator lib | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-16

memorymanager

2 70 10.0 C++

A simple, thread-safe memory manager for 64bit C++ applications and games. Focus is on preventing heap fragmentation in the absence of good virtual memory management, at the cost of wasting some memory. It works by globally overriding the new and delete operators.

Project mention: How to manage a buffer containing objects of varying size? For sparse chunk loading/unloading | /r/Cplusplus | 2023-06-16

the only person to have suggested a solution linked me this: https://github.com/schulkinator/memorymanager

RTSHA

3 9 8.4 C++

Real Time Safety Heap Allocator

Project mention: Rtsha v1.0 | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-11-19

InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com sponsored

Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).