<divclass="textblock"><p>This is the API documentation of the <ahref="https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc">mimalloc</a> allocator (pronounced "me-malloc") – a general purpose allocator with excellent <ahref="bench.html">performance</a> characteristics. Initially developed by Daan Leijen for the run-time systems of the <ahref="https://github.com/koka-lang/koka">Koka</a> and <ahref="https://github.com/leanprover/lean">Lean</a> languages.</p>
<p>It is a drop-in replacement for <code>malloc</code> and can be used in other programs without code changes, for example, on Unix you can use it as: </p><divclass="fragment"><divclass="line">> LD_PRELOAD=/usr/bin/libmimalloc.so myprogram</div></div><!-- fragment --><p>Notable aspects of the design include:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>small and consistent</b>: the library is less than 3500 LOC using simple and consistent data structures. This makes it very suitable to integrate and adapt in other projects. For runtime systems it provides hooks for a monotonic <em>heartbeat</em> and deferred freeing (for bounded worst-case times with reference counting).</li>
<li><b>free list sharding</b>: the big idea: instead of one big free list (per size class) we have many smaller lists per memory "page" which both reduces fragmentation and increases locality – things that are allocated close in time get allocated close in memory. (A memory "page" in <em>mimalloc</em> contains blocks of one size class and is usually 64KiB on a 64-bit system).</li>
<li><b>eager page reset</b>: when a "page" becomes empty (with increased chance due to free list sharding) the memory is marked to the OS as unused ("reset" or "purged") reducing (real) memory pressure and fragmentation, especially in long running programs.</li>
<li><b>secure</b>: <em>mimalloc</em> can be build in secure mode, adding guard pages, randomized allocation, encrypted free lists, etc. to protect against various heap vulnerabilities. The performance penalty is only around 3% on average over our benchmarks.</li>
<li><b>first-class heaps</b>: efficiently create and use multiple heaps to allocate across different regions. A heap can be destroyed at once instead of deallocating each object separately.</li>
<li><b>bounded</b>: it does not suffer from <em>blowup</em> [1], has bounded worst-case allocation times (<em>wcat</em>), bounded space overhead (~0.2% meta-data, with at most 16.7% waste in allocation sizes), and has no internal points of contention using only atomic operations.</li>
<li><b>fast</b>: In our benchmarks (see <ahref="#performance">below</a>), <em>mimalloc</em> always outperforms all other leading allocators (<em>jemalloc</em>, <em>tcmalloc</em>, <em>Hoard</em>, etc), and usually uses less memory (up to 25% more in the worst case). A nice property is that it does consistently well over a wide range of benchmarks.</li>
</ul>
<p>You can read more on the design of <em>mimalloc</em> in the upcoming technical report which also has detailed benchmark results.</p>
