First screen, captured 4 days ago. Open the video.

What is malloc doing, anyway?

What HN thinks

A thread that set out to explain malloc and wandered off to stack-only languages, missiles and privatised water.

Avoid or control heap allocation
Several commenters favour stack-only languages like Goose, Zig's explicit allocators, or static preallocation to sidestep malloc. Others counter that this just moves allocation elsewhere, and they doubt Goose's benchmark claims.
brk-based allocators are dated
Some say the article's brk/sbrk model is obsolete next to mmap-based allocators like jemalloc and mimalloc. Others reply that glibc still works this way and that it is the right place to start learning.
Reading malloc teaches a lot
Commenters argue over whether malloc is just a thin wrapper over the kernel. Most say userspace allocators hold most of the interesting design and are well worth studying.

Consensus: There is no single best allocator: the right strategy depends on the use case, and production allocators are far faster than the toy one in the article.

Recommended in the comments

mimalloc (library): Commenters called it a modern allocator with a reasonably approachable codebase to study.
Goose ↗ (tool): Some found its approach to avoiding a general heap exciting, though others questioned its claims.
Zig (tool): Explicit allocator choice lets callers control allocations made inside library code, for example by passing an arena.
Professional Linux Kernel Architecture (book): It describes Linux memory management in great detail.
Harvard CS61 ↗ (other): Recommended as a good learning resource on memory allocation and related topics.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 3 days ago.

Points: 242
Comments: 62
Best rank: #4
Posted: 2026-11-09 by benmandrew
Category: Programming

malloc memory-allocation glibc c linux syscalls virtual-memory

All captures:

Full page

Captured 4 days ago. Click for the whole screenshot.

Looks similar

To Do Nothing (shilin.ca)

24 points by true_pk 1 year ago | 9 comments

Screenshot of lowkey.party: Running web sites makes me not want to

Running web sites makes me not want to (lowkey.party)

63 points by speckx 1 day ago | 37 comments

A personal blog post about how LLM scraper traffic on a self-hosted site led the author to block cloud IP ranges and consider replacing their photography website with physical zines.

self-hosting ai-scrapers llm nftables