This paper on a malloc() replacement that DOES COMPACTION even on C/C++ is making the rounds: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.04738.pdf

Scarily beautiful.

@federicomena Interesting! Well worth a read!

Strikes me that GNOME partitions their heap quite similarly with their "Slice" allocator, so I wonder how quickly they would adopt this?

@alcinnz I'm afraid glib's slice allocator is pretty obsolete these days 😅

I think it was nice when system malloc() was slow, but those have improved a lot. Also, unfortunately Glib's slice allocator could never really use the recycle-to-default-values scheme from Solaris's original allocator.

I don't remember if the GTK team had plans to remove GSlice and just use malloc... maybe @hergertme@mastodon.social remembers?