On Wednesday, 5 February 2014 at 19:39:43 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
You do figure that complicates usage considerably, right?
I don't see much evidence for that. Many, many newer modules in
Phobos are currently allocation free yet still pretty easy to use.
A major source of little allocations in my code is std.conv and
std.string. But these aren't difficult to change to external
allocation, in theory at least:
string s = to!string(50); // GC allocates (I'd keep this for
convenience and compatibility)
char[16] buffer;
char[] s = toBuffer(buffer[], 50); // same thing, using a buffer
char[] s = toLowerBuffer(buffer[], "FOO");
assert(buffer.ptr is s);
assert(s == "foo");
That's not hard to use (though remembering that s is a borrowed
reference to a stack buffer might be - escape analysis is
something we should really have).
And it gives full control over both allocation and deallocation.
It'd take some changes in phobos, but so does the RCSlice sooo
yeah, and this actually decouples it from the GC.
The tricky part might be making it work with buffers, growable
buffers, sink functions, etc., but we've solved similar problems
with input ranges.
I was thinking RCSlice would be a better alternative.
I very rarely care about when little slices are freed. Large
blocks of memory might be another story (I've used malloc+free
for a big internal buffer in my png.d after getting memory leaks
from false poitners with teh gc) but those can be handled on a
case by case basis. std.base64 for example might make sense to
return one of these animals.
I don't have a problem with refcounting on principle but most the
time, it just doesn't matter.
