An important pull request: accessing shared affix for immutable data

[ZombineDev via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 13 February 2016 at 01:42:08 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On 02/13/2016 03:35 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Folks who defined refcounted types use the special 
>> AffixAllocator internally in an encapsulated manner. They 
>> define it, they use it - outside intervention is not possible. 
>> Those who use their own allocation calls and then use 
>> assumeUnique cannot use it on the new types. Or maybe I'm not 
>> understanding something.
>
> Ah probably this is the important point I have totally missed. 
> So you envision this kind of metadata support to be only 
> available via specific type of allocator, AffixAllocator, and 
> not being supported by most of them?

That's the most important part of the current design of 
std.allocator, IMO:
1) allocators are made to be composabled - they only perform 
suballocations.
2) allocators are first class value types - this makes them 
usable in pure code. Also only `shared` Allocators objects can be 
used by more than one thread.