mjansson/rpmalloc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2498 stars · 211 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

rpmalloc is a public domain cross-platform lock-free thread-caching memory allocator implemented in a single ~3300-line C source file with 16-byte alignment. It aims to outperform popular allocators like tcmalloc, hoard, and ptmalloc3 with low memory overhead.

Use cases

• replace malloc with a faster allocator in a C/C++ application
• reduce allocation contention in multithreaded programs
• drop a single-file allocator into a game engine or performance-critical codebase
• benchmark my allocator against tcmalloc and mimalloc
• customize the memory mapping backend for an embedded or custom platform

When to choose

• you need a fast, low-overhead allocator with minimal integration effort
• you want permissive licensing (public domain / MIT)
• your workload is multithreaded with frequent small allocations
• you want a small, readable codebase you can modify

When to avoid

• you need garbage collection or heap debugging/leak-detection features
• you rely on allocator-specific extensions like jemalloc's profiling APIs
• your platform lacks atomic operations or an mmap-style virtual memory API

Facets

library · maturity stable

concurrency developer-tools performance developer-tools cross-platform windows cpp c memory-allocator lock-free thread-caching public-domain single-file linux macos ios android

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