Distributed Memory implementation

[Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2016 10:09:01 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> On Monday, 18 January 2016 at 05:59:15 UTC, tcak wrote:
>> Is there anything like this in Phobos, or shall I start my own
>> implementation?
> 
> It isn't really clear to me what you are trying to do. IIRC the C++
> deque is usually implemented as an array of pointers to fixed sized
> memory blocks.
> 
> Is that what you are trying to achieve?

It's a rope-style data structure, but for void[] rather than strings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

An interesting property of this is that, while you can issue pointers to 
memory within this rope, it takes caution to ensure that a pointer 
remains within the rope. Instead of just incrementing the pointer, you 
would need to call a function on the rope to ensure that it promotes the 
pointer to the next memory segment as appropriate.

This also means you can't store a multibyte object in the rope and use it 
in place. (Consider: the first block is one byte, the second is seven 
bytes; you store a ulong in the rope.) You must always copy it out, use 
it, and optionally store it back.

A friendly API would have convenience methods for mutating structured 
data within the rope.

This is why just using joiner isn't that friendly, even if joiner did 
have opSlice, opIndex, etc.