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Their internal states in Rust are also namespaced, so two incompatible crates in the same process won't observe each others symbols. If they access external resources that are not namespaced though, that could be a problem.



How would that work for malloc? How can you have two different functions manage the same heap?


"The same heap" isn't a coherent concept here. Your malloc-implementing memory allocator has some global state, and that state has some pointers to some addresses it got from mmap and some metadata about how long those spans of memory are, which parts are unused, and how long the values it has returned from malloc previously are. If you managed to use two of these, they would each contain data referring to different non-overlapping sets of memory mappings. If you accidentally used a pointer from one with the other, you would go instantly to C UB land:

  The free() function frees the memory space pointed to by ptr, which must have been returned by a previous call to malloc(), calloc() or realloc(). Otherwise, or if free(ptr) has already been called before, undefined behavior occurs. If ptr is NULL, no operation is performed.


But malloc calls sbrk(), right?


I can't speak to multiple users of sbrk, I assume that would fail. That's a property of sbrk though, not of malloc (or memory allocation in general); on Windows, you can have as many implementors of malloc as you want, so long as malloc/free calls happen to the same implementor. Each malloc implementor just asks for anonymous backing pages for their own heaps (via VirtualAlloc/mmap).


It depends on the implementation. For example, jemalloc can use sbrk(), sbrk() and mmap() or just mmap(), depending on what your os supports.


Such as stdout or stderr that a log crate would be using?


That's not a very clear example. You don't need to be using multiple versions of the same dependency to contend on access to stderr/out, just having a println in your code along with logging code will have the same effect.

I haven't ever observed a problem of concurrent access to stdout/err though, I expect because the methods for accessing stdout/err lock them for the duration of their printing. If you Google for "Rust print console slow", you'll probably find advice to explicitly lock it, to avoid individual printlns from each acquiring the lock.




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