microsoft/snmalloc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1961 stars · 134 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

snmalloc is a high-performance, message-passing based memory allocator from Microsoft, usable as a header-only C++ library, via LD_PRELOAD, or from Rust. It excels at cross-thread deallocation and batched frees with lock-free remote deallocation and an optional hardened build with allocation randomisation and metadata protection.

Use cases

• replace glibc malloc with a faster allocator
• speed up multithreaded apps that free memory on other threads
• reduce allocator contention on many-core servers
• use a hardened allocator against heap corruption exploits
• use snmalloc from Rust via the snmalloc-rs crate
• LD_PRELOAD an allocator without recompiling

When to choose

• workloads with cross-thread deallocation or large batch frees
• many-core applications needing scalable allocation
• security-sensitive apps wanting hardened heap features
• you want a drop-in malloc replacement or header-only C++ integration

When to avoid

• tiny single-threaded programs where allocator choice barely matters
• platforms without supported backend abstractions
• you need allocator features like full heap profiling or GC integration

Facets

library · maturity active

caching concurrency developer-tools performance developer-tools microservices windows cpp rust cross-platform memory-allocator malloc message-passing header-only hardened-allocator ld-preload linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="microsoft/snmalloc")