Top 8 memory-allocator Open-Source Projects

Mesh

6 1,702 3.7 C++

A memory allocator that automatically reduces the memory footprint of C/C++ applications.
snmalloc

8 1,488 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.

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.
hardened_malloc

652 1,152 7.9 C

Hardened allocator designed for modern systems. It has integration into Android's Bionic libc and can be used externally with musl and glibc as a dynamic library for use on other Linux-based platforms. It will gain more portability / integration over time.

Project mention: WhatsApp forces Pegasus spyware maker to share its secret code | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-03-02

isoalloc

3 351 7.9 C

A general purpose memory allocator that implements an isolation security strategy to mitigate memory safety issues while maintaining good performance
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.
buddy_alloc

7 117 7.3 C

A single header buddy memory allocator for C & C++

Project mention: buddy memory allocator - project update (2 years) | /r/C_Programming | 2023-06-12

If you need a sub-allocator with predictable performance feel free to give it a try. The code is here and it is licensed under the 0BSD license, making it as lax and as close to public domain as possible. Comments, issues and PRs are always welcomed and appreciated. Thanks!

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

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.
RTSHA

3 9 8.4 C++

Real Time Safety Heap Allocator

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

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).