TempAlloc Overhaul

[Robert Jacques]

On Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:35:43 -0400, Jose Armando Garcia  
<jsancio at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 1:26 PM, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I've overhauled my TempAlloc proposal based on some of the suggestions  
>> I've
>> received.  Here are the major changes:
>>
>> 1.  I've reconsidered and decided TempAlloc belongs in its own Phobos  
>> module
>> (std.tempalloc) instead of in core.memory, mainly because it uses  
>> Phobos in
>> ways that aren't easy to get rid of.
>>
>> 2.  Move uninitializedArray (formerly newVoid) to its own pull request  
>> for
>> inclusion in std.array.  This keeps the TempAlloc proposal more tightly
>> focused.
>>
>> 3.  Make alignedMalloc and friends private for now, again to make the
>> proposal more tightly focused.
>>
>> 4.  Rename tempdup to tempArray to emphasize that is semantics are more
>> similar to std.array.array than .dup w.r.t. narrow strings.
>>
>> 5.  Move newStack into the TempAlloc namespace and rename it
>> TempAlloc.newArray.
>>
>> 6.  TempAlloc.newArray now handles multidimensional arrays.  Its syntax  
>> is
>> slightly modified to accommodate this.  Before:
>>
>> double[] foo = newStack!double(100);
>>
>> After:
>>
>> double[] foo = TempAlloc.newArray!(double[])(100);
>>
>> Code:
>>
>> https://github.com/dsimcha/TempAlloc
>>
>> Docs (NOT the same as the old URL):
>>
>> http://cis.jhu.edu/~dsimcha/d/phobos/std_tempalloc.html
>>
>
> Just a high-level comment.
>
> Now that you moved it to its own namespace do you have a need for a
> struct with only static method? I think it is an abuse of the language
> to use struct as a way of namespacing.

First, TempAlloc was originally developed in its own namespace. Second,  
there are no name conflicts between core.memory and TempAlloc which would  
require a sub-namespace. Third, Structs don't provide a true namespace.  
What you're neglecting is that each of those function names can't stand by  
itself. For example, people assume malloc and free always refer to the C  
functions. So, the TempAlloc functions would normally be TempAllocMalloc  
or TempAllocFree. But once the number of functions like this grows past a  
certain size, using TempAlloc.free, becomes syntactically nicer than  
TempAllocFree.