Talc Dynamic Memory Allocator

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What is this for?

• Embedded systems, OS kernels, and other no_std environments
• WebAssembly modules, as a drop-in replacement for DLmalloc

Why Talc?

Performance:

• Fast & Efficient: Benchmarks (Linux x86_64)
• Fast & Small: WebAssembly Benchmarks

Features:

• Safe, lockless TalcCell for single-threaded allocation with GlobalAlloc and Allocator
• Flexible locking using lock_api for multi-threaded allocation using TalcLock
• Supports allocator-api2 for using the Allocator API in safe Rust
• "counters": Provides allocation statistics for debugging and performance insights
• Supports creating and resizing arbitrarily many heaps, manually or automatically
• Supports automatic reclaim of unused memory
• Correctness verified with tests, MIRI, and fuzzing

Why not Talc?

If you're on a mature hosted system, especially one that jemalloc or mimalloc supports, consider those instead. Those provide allocation concurrency, well-tested virtual memory API integration, and are all-round more mature and sophisticated and more cleverly implemented than Talc. Even the default allocator for Rust on Linux, for example, has impressive performance characteristics.

Getting started

• The talc README
• The talc README for WebAssembly
• The API reference