On Wednesday, 20 April 2016 at 21:26:12 UTC, Alex Parrill wrote:
This would be best implemented in a "building block" allocator
that wraps a different allocator and uses the 'allocate'
function, making it truly optional. It would also need a
timeout to fail eventually, or else you possibly wait forever.
I'd say either you specify the amount of retries, or give some
amount that would be acceptable for some background program to
retry for. Say, 30 seconds.
Although IF the memory could be rearranged and a second
attempt made before deciding to throw could be useful
This is the mechanism used for "copying" garbage collectors.
They can only work if they can know about and alter all
references to the objects that they have allocated, which makes
them hard to use for languages with raw pointers like D.
I was thinking more along the lines of having a slot with the
memory data and you never take the pointer address, using
everything through the API. As long as nothing is shared between
threads and there are no pointers in the data then
realigning/compacting memory is fine. But then there's a
potential speed cost if there's a lot to work with.
