Re: Lua and custom memory allocators

[Mike Pall <mikelu-0804@...>]

Alex Davies wrote:
> I'm lost as to why my VS seems to be so slow.

It's not about the VS version or the compiler you use. The culprit
is the C runtime library you are linking against (not that you
have much of a choice with a given VS version).

MSVCR70 and later (in release mode) just hand all calls to malloc
over to HeapAlloc. Older versions up to and including MSVCRT6
supposedly do some internal pooling for small memory allocations.

This means you are probably experiencing the (lack of) performance
of HeapAlloc, which is OS-specific. From a quick search on the web
it seems that this has varied from plain awful (pre-W2K) to so-so
(Vista). For this reason practically every larger Windows app
includes their own malloc replacement. Seems you've just
discovered this yourself. :-)

About GNU toolchains for Windows: MinGW32 links against MSVCRT6,
MinGW64 links against MSVCR80 and Cygwin links against a port of
glibc by default. Again, this has nothing to do with the compiler,
which is GCC in all cases.

--Mike