Hi all,
Eduard, Alexandru Jercaianu and I are working on improving allocators'
design and implementation. This entails a few breaking changes.
In order to make matters easier for code using allocators, Sebastian
Wilzbach created a dub package freezing the existing API:
http://code.dlang.org/packages/stdx-allocator. Please use that until we
work the kinks out of allocators - great things are coming! - and after
that feel free to upgrade code to use the new and improved allocators.
One rather disruptive piece we're working on is converting IAllocator
from an interface to a reference counted structs (that in turn uses an
interface internally). This is so there is deterministic control of how
many users a given allocator has, so it can be destroyed deterministically.
Another possible work item was raised by
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/5879. Currently, allocators traffic
in void[]. When I first designed allocators, I considered using ubyte[]
instead. Using void[] is somewhat closer to the intent of allocators -
that memory is meant to be used for storing anything. However, using
void[] makes it difficult to express the fact that allocate() is a safe
function for virtual all allocators. So we may switch to ubyte[] to
express that at the lowest level we're trafficking chunks of octets.
This is not a big design change, but it's bound to break code.
Thanks,
Andrei
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