Library Development: What to finish/flesh out?

[Sean Kelly]

On Mar 17, 2011, at 11:56 PM, Don wrote:

> dsimcha wrote:
>> I've accumulated a bunch of little libraries via various evening and weekend
>> hacking projects over the past year or so, in various states of completion.
>> Most are things I'm at least half-considering for Phobos, though some belong
>> as third-party libs.  I definitely don't have time to finish/flesh out all of
>> them anytime soon, so I've decided to ask the community what to prioritize.
>> Below is a summary of everything I've been working on, with its current level
>> of completion.  Please let me know the following:
> 
>> 3.  TempAlloc:  A memory allocator based on a thread-local segmented stack,
>> useful for allocating large temporary buffers in things like numerics code.
>> Also comes with a hash table, hash set and AVL tree optimized for this
>> allocation scheme.  The advantages over plain old stack allocation are that
>> it's independent of function calls (meaning you can return pointers to
>> TempAlloc-allocated memory from a function, etc.) and it's segmented, meaning
>> you can allocate huge buffers w/o risking stack overflow.  Its main weakness
>> is that this stack is not scanned by the GC, meaning that you can't store the
>> only reference to a GC-allocated piece of memory here.  However, in practice
>> large arrays of primitives are an extremely common case in
>> performance-critical code.  I find this module immensely useful in dstats and
>> Lars Kyllingstad uses it in SciD.  Getting it into Phobos would make it easy
>> for other scientific/numerics code to use it.  Completion state:  Working and
>> used.  Needs a litte cleanup and documentation.  (Phobos candidate)
> 
> This is #1. Far and away. Belongs in druntime.

Stuff like this is why core.memory isn't called core.gc.