Don't use musl if you care about performance
A developer warns against using the musl C library for performance-critical applications due to its suboptimal memory allocator and slow memory routines. The author suggests that while musl is useful for small projects, it is not suitable for high-performance production environments.
Why it matters
It provides critical technical guidance for developers choosing foundational libraries for containerized and high-performance software.
I've spent most of my career working inside the JVM, with a sidebar of Python. So the first time I hit incompatible libc with containerized Bifrost , and GPT suggested musl as the solution, not only did I jump on it, I moved my other Rust projects to musl as well. Self contained binaries with a single implementation backing them? Yes, please!
Then my colleague Ryan mentioned that musl is known to have a suboptimal allocator, and pointed me to Daniel Raneland's article . Uh-oh. I decided to measure it to see how bad it was.
So, yes: musl's allocator is indeed bad. Terrible, even. And (contrary to some of the articles I've read) not only in high concurrency scenarios; these numbers are from 4 core EC2 VMs, and Bifrost sizes its thread pools accordingly.
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