std.mmfile

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, August 07, 2013 10:18:14 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I'm looking into std.mmfile for one of my new D projects, and I'm
> concerned about its API: there is no way to explicit unmap the file??
> The docs say it will be unmapped when deleted, but isn't the delete
> operator deprecated? And the GC does not guarantee class dtors will ever
> get called. So how would I control when the mmfile is unmapped??
> 
> Currently I'm thinking of just using the C library mmap instead. :-(

MmFile really should be a reference-counted struct. It has no business being a 
class, and it wouldn't surprise me if it could use some other changes as well, 
but I haven't looked over it in detail. I've used it in a project or two, but 
it was for stuff like reading a h.264 file where you read it, operate on it, and 
exit, so I didn't care about stuff like unmapping. It may be that MmFile is 
mostly correct, or it may be that it needs a bigger overhaul of how it works. 
I don't know.

So, ideally, someone would take the time to rework std.mmfile, probably by 
creating something like MMFile (which arguably better follows the Phobos 
naming scheme anyway), which would be a reference-counted struct and contain 
whatever other changes it needed over MmFile, and then we could deprecate 
MmFile.

- Jonathan M Davis