In-place extension of arrays only for certain alignment?

[Ali Çehreli]

On 8/17/22 18:31, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

 > 1. I highly recommend trying out the ring buffer solution to see if it
 > helps. The disadvantage here is that you need to tie up at least a page
 > of memory.

I started to think holding on to multiple pages of memory should not 
matter anyway. If really needed, an array of Appenders could be used; 
when really really needed, they may come from a free list.

Aside: I looked at Appender's implementation and saw that extending is 
one of its concerns as well.

 > 2. All my tests using the ring buffer showed little to no performance
 > improvement over just copying back to the front of the buffer. So
 > consider just copying the data back to the front of an already allocated
 > block.

That makes sense as well. One worry would be types with copy 
constructors. (I am not sure whether D is still a language where structs 
can freely be moved around.)

 > IIRC, your data does not need to be sequential in *physical memory*,
 > which means you can use a ring buffer that is segmented instead of
 > virtually mapped, and that can be of any size.

I thought about that as well. But I would like the sizes of blocks 
(Appenders?) be equal in size so that opIndex still can provide O(1) 
guarantee. (Compute the block + an offset.)

 >
 > -Steve

Ali