Thinking to reactivate wee_alloc

⚓ Rust    📅 2026-04-01    👤 surdeus    👁️ 5      

surdeus

I am thinking to reactivate wee_alloc.

wee_alloc is a Rust #[global_allocator], and its whole pitch is tiny Wasm binaries. The README advertises under 1 KiB of uncompressed Wasm. Under the hood it is a simple first-fit free-list allocator: allocation is O(n), deallocation O(1). It also ships Unix, Windows, and static-array backends in addition to the Wasm backend.

As of April 2026, upstream is not just quiet, it is over. The latest published version is 0.4.5 from August 22, 2019. RustSec marked the crate unmaintained in September 2022 and warned that open memory-leak issues may make it unsuitable for production use. The GitHub repository was archived and made read-only on August 25, 2025 as part of the broader sunsetting of the rustwasm GitHub organization

Despite of long talks how it should not be used, there are still about 8000 daily downloads. There are some bug reports as well but it is possible to work on them.

So far I made it to build with modern tools, set up the CI pipeline again, advanced the versions of dependences and started looking into existing issues, there are 21 in total. Will be seen.

The project repository can be found at wee_alloc_bw. This is relatively specific crate so an announcement likely needs to be posted to get noticed that somebody is doing something with it.

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