Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@informatik.uni-muenchen.de> wrote,
The FFI libraries currently contain support for explicit allocation and deallocation via the malloc/free family and support for implicit allocation and deallocation via alloca and friends. But there is a very useful level between these extremes: Pooled memory management. Under this scheme, (re-)allocations belong to a given pool, and everything in a pool is deallocated when the pool itself is deallocated.
To be honest, I am reluctant to add this module to the FFI addendum. This is not to say that the module may not be useful and may not be a worthwhile addition to the library hierachy. Here are my reasons: * I want to get v1.0 of the spec fixed. We are really only in bug fix mode for quite a while and only the finalizer problems held us back from finishing the spec. * I am sure there are plenty more useful FFI-related libraries. However, the initial plan was to define basic functionality on top of which more elaborate schemes can be implemented. We need to draw the line somewhere. In particular, I don't want to add a largely untested library. So, I propose to add Pool to the portable libraries package, but leave it out of the spec. Cheers, Manuel