wee_alloc is unmaintained?

[djc]

See https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/x1cle0/dont_use_wee_alloc_in_production_code_targeting/ and rustwasm/wee_alloc#107.

[pinkforest]

884,115 downloads all time, ~2k a day

Hm looks like so. I'll try to do last desperate email to maintainer and ask what we should do with it

@fitzgen seems active in GitHub - we could nudge people to switch something maintained or would you be happy for people to still use the crate ? cc/ @pepyakin @DrGoldfire (bitbucket.org/DrGoldfire) @ZackPierce (other crate owners)

If we were to go nudging people what we should recommend as alternative(s) ? e.g. actionable fix

So we can just tell them to use std which is https://github.com/alexcrichton/dlmalloc-rs and what else hmm..

People seem to be mainly hitting that memory leak - also:
rustwasm/wee_alloc#85
rustwasm/wee_alloc#106

Silver lining when things go unmaintained people like tend to come up with research projects like lol alloc:
rustwasm/wee_alloc#107 (comment)

@Craig-Macomber how did you find the other alternative(s) when you did research around your lol_alloc ?

[pinkforest]

@djc want to do a PR or I can do later ? Seems we can flag unmaintained on it rustwasm/wee_alloc#107 (comment) .. just need some alternative(s) and maybe we can mention lol_alloc as a honorable research project

[djc]

I'm not involved enough to do a PR, just a drive-by issue because of the Reddit thread.

[pinkforest]

@MaxGraey @bkolobara @jsoverson @pkedy how do you feel about non-std allocators under wasm32 targets ?

I mean it just works right 🤷‍♀️ just curious around the needs / wants / other things out there as you've been deep end on this - I mean no_std the major selling point wouldn't be that big in wasm32 targets ?

I'm looking at the biggest consumer of this lib
https://crates.io/crates/parity-util-mem (7 months ago - 1,481,950 downloads, ~3k a day)

@dvdplm might have some ideas around this if non-std alternative allocator has use-cases today in wasm32 targets ?

PR's up: #1400

[bkolobara]

@MaxGraey @bkolobara how do you feel about non-std allocators under wasm32 targets ?

I only used the standard allocator and it was good enough for all my stuff (wasm on the backend).

[pepyakin]

I would say that wee_alloc is pretty much unmaintained, as it seems I and pretty much every other developer moved on. I would've recommended the users move to something else, but I don't have a good replacement in mind (besides dlmalloc which is the default).

I'm looking at the biggest consumer of this lib
https://crates.io/crates/parity-util-mem (7 months ago - 1,481,950 downloads, ~3k a day)

I think this is incidental. Substrate used to compile to w32-u-u, but not anymore since there is smoldot: it relies on the default allocator AFAIK.

[jsoverson]

I can echo the other comments. There's value in wee_alloc (et al) but only if it's progressing in step with the community, rust, and WebAssembly. If it's not, people should use the standard allocator.