| ▲ | RegnisGnaw 7 hours ago |
| Is there a concise timelime/history of this? I thought jemalloc was 100% open source, why is Meta in control of it? |
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| ▲ | masklinn 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Jason Evans (the creator of jemalloc) recounted the entire thing last year: https://jasone.github.io/2025/06/12/jemalloc-postmortem/ |
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| ▲ | vintermann 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Were I to reengage, the first step would be at least hundreds of hours of refactoring to pay off accrued technical debt." Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these. | | |
| ▲ | xxs 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Refactor doesn't mean just artificial puff-up jobs, it's very likely internal changes and reorganization (hence 100s of hours). There are not many engineers capable of working on memory allocators, so adding more burden by agentic stuff is unlikely to produce anything of value. | |
| ▲ | rvz 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these. No. This is something you shouldn't allow coding agents anywhere near, unless you have expert-level understanding required to maintain the project like the previous authors have done without an AI for years. | | |
| ▲ | kenferry 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hm, I wonder. I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency. |
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| ▲ | echelon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If you filter the commits to the past five years, four of the top six committers are Meta employees. The other two might be as well, it just doesn't say that on their Github / personal website. |
