Re: [Chicken-users] *crunch*

[felix winkelmann]

On 4/18/07, Ivan Raikov <address@hidden> wrote:
>    One thing I could not understand from your description is that you
> say no garbage collector is used, but dynamically allocated data are
> reference counted. What exactly does that mean? Do you care to
> elaborate on how storage is handled in Crunch? I ask because if I end
> up seriously using crunch, I might be interested in using it with a
> custom memory allocator interface, such as libarena:

Data buffers (SRFI-4 vectors and strings) are allocated via "crunch_malloc"
(defaults to malloc(3), but can be redefined by a macro) and freed using
"crunch_free". A buffer is a structure containing a pointer to the actual
storage, a pointer to ref-count cell and the length and are passed by
value throughout the generated code. Using copy-constructors and
overloaded assignment operators the ref-count is maintained. Since there
are no nested data structures (only number vectors), circular structures
are not a problem.

BTW, the template code in crunch.h is likely to be pretty naive. I'm not
a C++ guru. I'm sure there is a lot fo room for improvement.


cheers,
felix