On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Trevor Norris <trev.nor...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is for all the committers out there. > > While working on my latest Buffers PR, noticed there are > undocumented/unenforced ways things can go wrong. Say, for example, a user > wants to extend Buffer with their own set of methods/properties and just > happen to name one of them 'parent' or 'offset'. imho The least I would like > to see them mentioned in the docs, and possibly underscored.
I'm not that worried about people sub-classing Buffer because they shouldn't really be doing that in the first place. Buffer is the closest thing node.js has to a primitive and people should treat it as such. > The following are more complex changes I would like to implement, but really > need feedback whether they'd be accepted or not: > > I noticed that every Buffer() call has to reach out to C. Either to create a > new SlowBuffer or FastBuffer. Because of this, there are optimizations that > cannot be performed by the v8 compiler. Even calls to 'this.parent.*' can't > be optimized well since they require a 'context change' (which could be > helped by placing the calls directly on the Buffer instance). For these and > stability reasons (ability to internally manage 'offset's and the like) I > propose that the memory allocation and management of Slow/Fast Buffers be > moved to C land. > > The basics right now would be to: > - Internally track memory pointers for FastBuffers. > - 'parent' would no longer exists in userland. > - Key user facing properties (e.g. length) are made read-only. > > There would be no changes to the documented API. Just, hopefully, making > Buffers a little quicker and more predictable. I'm okay with that, with the caveat that there should be no performance or behavior regressions whatsoever. That means writing a lot of tests and benchmarks. :-) -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to nodejs@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nodejs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
