Hello all, but specially Cedric and Jorge as one of you did initial
eina_inlist and we're about to release eina as 1.0 so we need to know
if things need/could be changed to improve things before that.

Today eina_inlist does not keep an accounting member as its eina_list
counterpart, instead it keeps a pointer to "last" that is just valid
on the head member (as we'll not walk the list updating all ->last as
we append stuff). That leaves us with a sizeof(pointer) lost in every
member but the first.

Two options with that:
   - add accounting: suggested by raster, it does make sense as it
would make eina_inlist_count() O(1) and behavior similar to eina_list,
better use of that pointer.
   - ultra-dirty hack to remove extra pointer. The hack bases on the
fact that we just use ->last from the first node, that always have the
->prev == NULL. So we could have the first ->prev == ->last, but how
to know it's the first then, you might ask? Easy! Just use the fact
that valid addresses are multiple of sizeof(word) and you're done, no
supported platform uses less than 4 bytes, so ->prev = ->last | 1;
would work, and checks  for ->last & 1 would tell you if it's the case
or not.

The ultra dirty hack could be used to save the extra ->accounting from
eina_list as well, and instead of adding last as said in the previous
example, we could store accounting there. Dirty but useful, if people
are using macros then we've almost no porting to do. As this uses
->prev (a not so used pointer in outer world) we don't have much work
to do, just introduce EINA_LIST_FIRST_IS() and EINA_LIST_LAST_IS()
(the last would still check for NULL, but just to make further changes
easier).

What do you think? Should we change eina_inlist to have an accounting
and still use 3 pointers per node? Should we move to the said trick?
Also for eina_list? SAY IT SOON OR LIVE WITH THAT :-D

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
--------------------------------------
MSN: [email protected]
Skype: gsbarbieri
Mobile: +55 (19) 9225-2202

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