For some context on why this release is notable: Jemalloc Postmortem [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44264958">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44264958</a>

damn i always thought it was a french thing, this is blowing my mind

Rather a tradition to call a malloc by the initials of the implementer: Jason Evans malloc (jemalloc), Poul-Henning Kamp malloc (phkmalloc), Doug Lea (dlmalloc).P.S. I also wondered whether systemd had any cultural reference to Système D aka Système Débrouillard, but Pottering does not seem to be someone engaging in word play, so probably not.

Thanks, now my brain will forever read it like that. I&#x27;m not even a little bit French.

I always wondered, is it French? &quot;Je m&#x27;alloc du memory&quot;

&gt; Just wish we have a little bit of contextSee the comment of vocx2tx

It&#x27;s only mentioned in history: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jemalloc&#x2F;jemalloc&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Background#history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jemalloc&#x2F;jemalloc&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Background#history</a>

Ok. Why both the homepage and its Github repo doesn&#x27;t make a single mention of Jason Evans? I know he stepped down but surely it is at least worst mentioning it?Is Meta still using it and developing it? If not who are the driving force behind it now? I just checked there wasn&#x27;t a release since 2022 and then we have this now. Something changed?Just wish we have a little bit of context. But it is also great it is continue being maintained. It makes a huge difference for Ruby on Rails Apps.

does anyone familiar with the art have thoughts on why only tcmalloc switched from thread caches to cpu caches? would it make linux behavior diverge too much from other platforms?

Upvoted for the same reason. We would not be able to run our workloads without Jemalloc. Kudos to this awesome piece of software.

You are not alone - my first thought was &#x27;oh, HN is trying to bring back the disappointed hackers&#x27;. All this AI hype over every little model update fart is so exhausting and boring …

I upvoted it because I benefit from jemalloc in my stack (RoR) and I am tired of AI taking over HN front page. Let the hacker spirit be back!

Development was never stopped for jemalloc. This is a common misconception. There just were not releases being tagged and packaged against the ongoing development.

They resumed development on jemalloc only recently, after years of no releases.

The noted resumption and likely a small amount of halo effect from the Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms thread two &#x2F; three days ago.- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49715318">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49715318</a>

I just checked whether it&#x27;s the first release after Jason Evans stepped down as maintainer, but it isn&#x27;t. That was the previous release, 5.3.1

In the Before Times, the vast majority of software was written in garbage collected language where a working knowledge of the relative merits of C memory allocators is not useful or particularly relevant.Why would the scads of people writing JavaScript, Java, python, go, rails, etc need to be aware of jemalloc?

Why? Writing a memory allocator is quite simple, and I&#x27;d argue that _everyone_ should write one from scratch for any kind of high performance application. It&#x27;s also trivial to outperform general purpose allocators that have to satisfy countless constraints. I&#x27;ve written numerous special purpose mallocs that are a) both provably (formally) safer than the standard armada and b) significantly faster (&gt;10x throughput).

jemalloc is something you should be aware of if you do software for a living

because people like you are too busy whining about it to put up something more interesting

Why is this on the HN front page? Is there something particularly noteworthy about this release?

Jemalloc 5.4.0