What is malloc doing, anyway?
0 comments
- Points219
- Comments61
–Rank now
#6Peak rank
2Days on list
195Score · 7d
Nov 9, 2026First seen
Rank · 7 days
On Hacker News
- Points
- 219
- Comments
- 61
- Submitted by
- benmandrew
- Posted
- Nov 9, 2026
- Site
- benmandrew.com
Story details from Hacker News ↗ · linked article on benmandrew.com.
Trending history
What is malloc doing, anyway? was first seen on Hacker News · Front page on Nov 9, 2026. Since then it has appeared in 68 checks on 2 different days. Its best position was #6 of 30, reached on Nov 9, 18:54 UTC. It dropped off the list after Nov 10, 05:39 UTC. The same link also trended on Lobsters, which raises its cross-platform score.
Rank history
Position on Hacker News · Front page at every check (lower is better).
Last 14 days
Best rank per day (UTC).
6
10
Oct 28today
Metric history
Platform metric as reported by Hacker News.
Where it trended
| List | Best | Days | Checks | Last seen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hacker News · Front page | #6 | 2 | 68 | |
| LLobsters · Hottest What is malloc doing, anyway? | same link | |||
From the discussion
A few top-level comments from Hacker News, shortened. Read the full thread on Hacker News.
Tangential, but the complexity and over-head of the malloc abstraction is precisely what made me very intrigued by "stack-only" languages, such a recently published Goose. There is something very elegant and exciting about the idea of (almost) completely getting rid of it. Just as modern programming languages have…
This is mostly describing a kind of obsolete allocator that uses the brk to adjust a single contiguous heap range. This is basically irrelevant with virtual memory and mmap. The good malloc impls (jemalloc, mimalloc) don't do this.
I tried this on OpenBSD using ktrace / kdump. I added some utrace calls and had to increase the amount allocated significantly to get the mmap calls to show up. obsd just calls mmap with prot_read|prot_write meaning pages may be read/written.
Featured in
Archived daily, weekly and monthly lists that include this entry.
Hacker News 2 days, best #6
Questions
Is What is malloc doing, anyway? trending on Hacker News right now?
Not at the moment. It was last on the list on Nov 10, 05:39 UTC, after 2 days of trending.
What is the highest rank What is malloc doing, anyway? reached?
#6 on Hacker News · Front page, on Nov 9, 18:54 UTC. Trendoday checks this list every 15 minutes.
How long has What is malloc doing, anyway? been trending?
It was first seen on Nov 9, 2026 and has been on the list on 2 days (68 checks) since.
How much discussion did it get on Hacker News?
219 points and 61 comments; submitted by benmandrew on Nov 9, 2026.