I tried to use mimalloc and snmalloc and in both cases got crashes I don't get with glibc when interoperating with other libraries (libusb, jack, one that I suspect to be in the Nvidia driver) :(
If you are not properly overriding the allocator consistently for everything within an executable, that’s entirely possible (eg linking against 1 allocator and then linking with a dynamic library that’s using a different one). Without a specific repro it’s hard to distinguish PEBCAK from legit bug. Also it certainly can’t be the Nvidia driver since that’s not running anything in your process.
The explanation here is usually simpler. Any major change like this can lead to crashes.
If I have three libraries, biz, bar, and bif, and each has bugs. You've used biz. When the system was unstable, you'd debug until it works (either by finding the real bug, or by an innocuous change).
If you switch libraries, the bugs which go away are the ones which aren't affecting you, since your software works. On the other hand, you have a whole new set of bugs.
This comes up when upgrading libraries too. More bugs are usually fixed than introduced, but there's often a debug cycle.
> Also it certainly can’t be the Nvidia driver since that’s not running anything in your process.
A huge chunk of a modern GPU driver is part of the calling process, loaded like a regular library. Just spot checking Chrome's GPU thread, there's dozens of threads created by a single 80+mb nvidia DLL. And this isn't unusual, every GPU driver has massive libraries loaded into the app using the GPU - often including entire copies of LLVM for things like shader compilers.
