What's the D way of allocating memory?

[Ali Çehreli]

On 08/07/2013 01:16 PM, monarch_dodra wrote:

 > On Wednesday, 7 August 2013 at 18:56:40 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:

 >> But question to others: I wouldn't want garbage filled memory, right?
 >> So I should consider GC.calloc first.

 > Depends on why you think garbage is a problem I guess.
 >
 > If it is because of false pointers

Precisely.

 >, yet you aren't storing any pointers, then simply allocate
 > using GC.BlkAttr.NO_SCAN. Then, garbage won't be a problem.

But the attribute is in effect throughout the lifetime of that memory 
block, right?

 > Otherwise, yeah, calloc should do the trick. Unfortunatly, calloc
 > doesn't return much other than a void*, so depending on what you are
 > doing, a qalloc + memset might be better.

qalloc seems better but just like in C and C++, when comparing GC.malloc 
and GC.calloc, the default choice should always be GC.calloc.

So, GC.malloc is preferable only if the data that I am going to place in 
there will never need GC scanning. Because it provides zeroed-out 
memory, GC.calloc seems to be slower but I hear that that is not a 
problem on modern systems. (I have vague recollections that the system 
has already zeroed-out memory; but I am not sure.)

 > Also, keep in mind that 0-initialization is not T.init initialization.
 > This means that calloc'ed memory is not "initialized" per say, it is
 > just zero'ed memory. An emplace is necessary before attempting, say an
 > assignment.

Exactly. I wouldn't expect more from a function that returns void*. :)

Ali