Zig Allocator for Rust

Zig allocators for Rust applications, primarily useful for development and debugging.

⚠️ Important Notice

This is a development/debugging tool, not a production allocator.

While Zig's allocators are production ready, this particular library hasn't been properly benchmarked.

For production applications, use proven allocators like jemalloc or mimalloc.

Quick Start

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
zigalloc = { git = "https://github.com/Antonito/zigalloc-rs" }

Requirements:

• Rust nightly (for #![feature(allocator_api)])
• zig 0.14.0

Available Allocators

Custom Allocators (using allocator API)

• ZigSmpAllocator - Thread-safe general-purpose allocator (SmpAllocator)
• ZigArenaSmpAllocator - Arena allocator for bulk deallocation (ArenaAllocator)
• ZigDebugAllocator - Debug allocator with leak detection (DebugAllocator)

Global Allocators (drop-in replacements)

• ZigGlobalDebugAllocator - Global debug allocator for app-wide leak detection
• ZigGlobalSmpAllocator - Global SMP allocator for performance testing
• ZigGlobalArenaSmpAllocator - Global arena allocator (mainly for testing)

Usage Examples

Memory Leak Detection (scopped)

#![feature(allocator_api)]
use zigalloc::ZigDebugAllocator;

fn main() {
    let allocator = ZigDebugAllocator::new();

    let mut vec = Vec::<u8, &ZigDebugAllocator>::with_capacity_in(1000, &allocator);
    vec.push(42);

    // Memory leaks will be reported when allocator is dropped
}

Memory Leak Detection (app-wide)

use zigalloc::ZigGlobalDebugAllocator;

#[global_allocator]
static GLOBAL: ZigGlobalDebugAllocator = ZigGlobalDebugAllocator;

fn main() {
    // All allocations are now tracked for leaks
    let vec = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    let map = std::collections::HashMap::new();
}

Running Examples

The repository includes simple examples for each allocator:

# Custom allocator examples
cargo run --example smp_allocator
cargo run --example arena_allocator
cargo run --example debug_allocator

# Global allocator examples
cargo run --example global_debug_allocator
cargo run --example global_smp_allocator
cargo run --example global_arena_allocator

Building

The build process automatically:

1. Compiles the Zig allocator library
2. Links it statically into your Rust binary
3. No manual Zig installation required

zig needs to be installed on the machine