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* Switch to a multidimensional taxonomy.
Rather than encoding the abstract bound states in a single enum, move to a
more algebraic treatment. The dimensions themselves are within the
snmalloc::capptr_bounds namespace so that their fairly generic names do not
conflict with consumer code. Aliases for many points in the space are
established outside that namespace for ease of use elsewhere.
* Introduce several new namespaces:
* snmalloc::capptr::dimension holds each of the dimension enums
* snmalloc::capptr holds the bound<> type itself and a ConceptBound
* snmalloc::capptr::bounds gives convenient specializations of bound<>
* snmalloc::capptr also has aliases for CapPtr<> itself
All told, rather than `CapPtr<T, CBChunk>`, we now expect client code to read
`capptr::Chunk<T>` in almost all cases (and this is just an alias for the
appropriate `CapPtr<T, bounds<...>>` type). When the bound<>s themselves are
necessary, as when calling capptr_bound, we expect that they will almost
always be pronounced using an alias (e.g., `capptr::bounds::Alloc`).
* Chase consequences.
* Prune old taxa and aliases that are no longer in use in snmalloc2.
snmalloc
snmalloc is a high-performance allocator.
snmalloc can be used directly in a project as a header-only C++ library,
it can be LD_PRELOADed on Elf platforms (e.g. Linux, BSD),
and there is a crate to use it from Rust.
Its key design features are:
- Memory that is freed by the same thread that allocated it does not require any synchronising operations.
- Freeing memory in a different thread to initially allocated it, does not take any locks and instead uses a novel message passing scheme to return the memory to the original allocator, where it is recycled. This enables 1000s of remote deallocations to be performed with only a single atomic operation enabling great scaling with core count.
- The allocator uses large ranges of pages to reduce the amount of meta-data required.
- The fast paths are highly optimised with just two branches on the fast path for malloc (On Linux compiled with Clang).
- The platform dependencies are abstracted away to enable porting to other platforms.
snmalloc's design is particular well suited to the following two difficult scenarios that can be problematic for other allocators:
- Allocations on one thread are freed by a different thread
- Deallocations occur in large batches
Both of these can cause massive reductions in performance of other allocators, but do not for snmalloc.
Comprehensive details about snmalloc's design can be found in the accompanying paper, and differences between the paper and the current implementation are described here. Since writing the paper, the performance of snmalloc has improved considerably.
Further documentation
Contributing
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