Building

Checkout the sources from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc

Windows

Open ide/vs2019/mimalloc.sln in Visual Studio 2019 and build (or ide/vs2017/mimalloc.sln). The mimalloc project builds a static library (in out/msvc-x64), while the mimalloc-override project builds a DLL for overriding malloc in the entire program.

macOS, Linux, BSD, etc.

We use cmake¹ as the build system:

> mkdir -p out/release
> cd out/release
> cmake ../..
> make

This builds the library as a shared (dynamic) library (.so or .dylib), a static library (.a), and as a single object file (.o).

> sudo make install (install the library and header files in /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/include)

You can build the debug version which does many internal checks and maintains detailed statistics as:

> mkdir -p out/debug
> cd out/debug
> cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ../..
> make

This will name the shared library as libmimalloc-debug.so.

Finally, you can build a secure version that uses guard pages, encrypted free lists, etc, as:

> mkdir -p out/secure
> cd out/secure
> cmake -DMI_SECURE=ON ../..
> make

This will name the shared library as libmimalloc-secure.so. Use ccmake² instead of cmake to see and customize all the available build options.

Notes:

1. Install CMake: sudo apt-get install cmake
2. Install CCMake: sudo apt-get install cmake-curses-gui