Memory management ​

mimalloc is nice general purpose allocator.

Notes ​

• Reference counting is a form of garbage collection

Links ​

• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007) (Web)
• Memory Management Reference - Resource for programmers and computer scientists interested in memory management and garbage collection. (HN)
• Memory Pool System - Flexible and adaptable memory manager. Among its many advantages are an incremental garbage collector with very low pause times, and an extremely robust implementation. (Code)
• A unified theory of garbage collection (2004) (PDF) (PDF)
• Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math (2020)
• Isolation Alloc - New general purpose secure memory allocator that implements an isolation security strategy to mitigate memory safety issues.
• Broom - Ergonomic tracing garbage collector that supports mark 'n sweep garbage collection.
• Writing a Memory Allocator (2019) (HN)
• Writing a Pool Allocator (2019)
• Writing a Mark-Sweep Garbage Collector (2020)
• rpmalloc - Cross platform lock free thread caching 16-byte aligned memory allocator implemented in C.
• memleax - Debugs memory leak of a running process by attaching it, without recompiling or restarting.
• An introduction to virtual memory (2020) (HN)
• Visualizing memory management in Rust (2020)
• Memory Allocators 101 - Write a simple memory allocator (2015)
• gperftools - Collection of a high-performance multi-threaded malloc() implementation, plus some pretty nifty performance analysis tools.
• Memory Consistency Models: A Tutorial (2016) (HN)
• The memory models that underlie programming languages (2016) (HN)
• Modern garbage collection (2016) - A look at the Go GC strategy.
• Virtual Memory Tricks (2017)
• Reference counting vs GC (2020)
• Memory allocator showdown (2020)
• Understanding memory initialization patterns
• Custom Allocators Demystified (2020) (HN)
• MMTk - Framework for the design and implementation of memory managers. In Rust. (Web)
• Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management (2005)
• The Lost Art of Structure Packing - Technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size.
• klox - Proof-of-concept demonstration of O(1) garbage collection. (HN) (Lobsters)
• herdtools7 - Tool suite to test weak memory models.
• Sound Garbage Collection for C using Pointer Provenance (2020)
• Memory Management in Lobster
• Generational references faster than reference counting (2021) (Lobsters)
• When allocators are hoarding your precious memory (2021)
• Writing a Simple Garbage Collector in C (2020) (Lobsters)
• A look into Automatic Reference Counting (2021)
• Papers for heap memory analysis and leak detection (2021)
• Memory Management Landscape
• Summarizing Garbage Collection (2016)
• Visualizing Garbage Collection Algorithms (2014)
• Baby's First Garbage Collector (2013) - Building simple mark-sweep garbage collector in C. (Code)
• Heapusage - Find memory leaks in Linux and macOS applications.
• Slitter - C- and Rust-callable slab allocator implemented primarily in Rust, with some C for performance or to avoid unstable Rust features.
• Mitigating Memory-Safety Bugs with Efficient Out-of-Process Integrity Checking (2021)
• A 5x reduction in RAM usage with Zoekt memory optimizations (2021) (HN)
• Friendship ended with the garbage collector (2021) (HN)
• Don’t forget about memory management — Go Time (2021)
• DUMA - Detect Unintended Memory Access. Red-Zone memory allocator.
• regalloc2 - New register allocator.
• Formalization of properties of a simple imperative, memory-safe language
• mtrace - Version of QEMU modified to log memory accesses and other system events to help analyze and understand the memory access patterns and cache line behavior of operating system-level code.
• Memory Performance in a Nutshell
• Awesome Allocators
• Interesting Garbage Collection Patterns (2021)
• SuperMalloc - Super Fast Multithreaded malloc() for 64-bit Machines.
• Mimalloc - Compact general purpose allocator with excellent performance.
• Mimalloc: Free List Sharding in Action (2019) (Lobsters)
• Garbage collection algorithms
• Vizzy - Tool for profiling heap usage and memory management.
• GCGC : Garbage Collection Graph Collector
• mem - Memory allocator for Go.
• 100LOC C impl of memset, that is faster than glibc's (HN)
• Debugging memory corruption: who the hell writes “2” into my stack? (2016) (HN)
• bustd - Lightweight process killer daemon for out-of-memory scenarios for Linux.
• What's a Memory Allocator Anyway? - Benjamin Feng (2021)
• The Garbage Collection Handbook: The art of automatic memory management (2020)
• memflow - Physical memory introspection framework. (Web)
• scanflow - Comprehensive memory scanning library based on memflow.
• tinyalloc - Replacement for malloc / free in unmanaged, linear memory situations, e.g. WASM and embedded devices.
• gcmodule - Garbage collection for Rust inspired by CPython's gcmodule.
• Optimising memset and memcpy (HN)
• Deconstructing the Garbage-First Collector (2020)
• llmalloc - Low-latency malloc implementation.
• Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use? A Controlled Experiment (2021) (Lobsters)
• Hardened malloc - Hardened allocator designed for modern systems.
• An Empirical Lower Bound on the Overheads of Production Garbage Collectors (2021) (Tweet)
• Fuite - CLI tool for finding memory leaks in web apps. (Article) (HN)
• malloc-rs - Implementation of malloc, realloc, calloc, and free in Rust.
• zig-gc - Simple mark-and-sweep garbage collector written in Zig.
• Declarative memory management (2019) (HN)
• Signals and Threads | Memory Management (2022) (Lobsters)
• HardsHeap - Universal and Extensible Framework for Evaluating Secure Allocators.
• CertiGC - Formally verified generational garbage collector.
• How Much Memory Is My Program Really Using? (2022)
• TinyGC (Tiny Garbage Collector) - Implementation of the subset of API of the well-known Boehm-Demers-Weiser Conservative GC.
• The Tower of Weakenings: Memory Models For Everyone (2022) (Reddit)
• Understanding Memory Allocation Size Limitations with Level Zero (2022)
• Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust (2022) (Reddit) (HN)
• GC workbench - Workspace for experimenting with garbage collectors.
• Chris Lattner on garbage collection vs. Automatic Reference Counting (2017) (HN)
• Low-Latency, High-Throughput Garbage Collection (2022)
• Distilling the Real Cost of Production Garbage Collectors (2022) (HN)
• Forgetting about the problem of memory (2022) (Lobsters)
• Memory safety for SerenityOS (2022)
• Benchmarking Malloc with Doom 3 (2022)
• Elise - Concurrent garbage collection crate based on shifgrethor.
• shifgrethor - Define an API for precise, tracing garbage collection in Rust which upholds all of Rust's safety guarantees.
• Treadmill garbage collector by H. Baker (2022) (HN)
• Valgrind - Instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. Automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. (Twenty years of Valgrind) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Vale's Hybrid-Generational Memory (2021)
• Reference count, don't garbage collect (2022) (HN)
• Automatic memory management with short pauses that is simple to implement? (2022)
• Perceus: Garbage Free Reference Counting with Reuse
• CactusRef - Cycle-Aware Reference Counting in Rust.
• On "correct and efficient work-stealing for weak memory models" (2022)
• Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator (2022) - Making performant dynamic manual memory management in C feel almost like garbage collection. (Lobsters) (HN)
• Memory Safety in a Modern Systems Programming Language (2022)
• The sticky mark-bit algorithm (2022)
• How we Eliminated 99% of gVisor Networking Memory Allocations with Enhanced Buffer Pooling (2022)
• Memory safety in C++, Zig, & Rust (2022)
• samsara - Reference-counting cycle collection library in rust.
• xv6: How exactly is memory addressed? (2020)
• Using rr to quickly debug memory corruption (2022)
• I Want a Memory Diagram Generator (2022) (Lobsters)
• Implementing the Perceus reference counting GC (2022)
• Fast memcpy, a system design (2022) (HN)
• gc-arena - Experimental system for rust garbage collection.
• Does Rust have the ultimate memory management solution? (2023)
• Pictures of a working garbage collector (2023) (HN)
• ugc - Single-header incremental garbage collector library.
• How Memory Safety Approaches Speed Up and Slow Down Development Velocity (2023)
• Garbage Collection (Mark & Sweep) - Computerphile (2023) (Lobsters)
• Rulloc - General purpose memory allocator written in Rust.
• smol world - Compact garbage-collected heap and JSON-like object model.
• OffsetAllocator - Fast O(1) offset allocator with minimal fragmentation.
• Exploring some worst-case latencies in GCs
• It’s a smol_world: thoughts and lessons (2023) (Lobsters)
• Rust and RAII Memory Management (2023)
• I built my own memory profiler (in Rust, on Linux) (2023)
• mevi - Memory visualizer in Rust (ptrace + userfaultfd).
• The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2023) (HN)
• Memory Allocation (2023) (HN)
• ps_mem - Utility to accurately report the in core memory usage for a program.
• Basic Allocator - Home-grown memory allocator written entirely in Rust. It is simple, and meant primarily for educational purposes.
• Memory Safety Without Borrow Checking, Reference Counting, or Garbage Collection (2023) (HN)
• Experimenting with Memory Management for Basil (2023) (Lobsters)
• Introducing Riptide: WebKit’s Retreating Wavefront Concurrent Garbage Collector (2017)
• Garbage Collection for MVCC – MyRocks, InnoDB and Postgres (2023) (HN)
• Type Systems for Memory Safety
• I built a garbage collector for a language that doesn’t need one (2023)
• Comet - Collection of various trace-based garbage collectors that can be used to implement programming language runtime in Rust.
• Parallel garbage collection for SBCL (Lobsters)