Re: Release plans

[Thomas Lord]

Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
> It looks to me like the buffer string routines Thomas is working on
> could perhaps make that easier to implement (in the DLL case of course).
> But I guess you have thought much more about that, Thomas?
>   


Not deeply (because I'm confident on general principles).

Using functional strings that, behind the scenes, share state
and use mutation rather than copy/alter when they can -- that
pattern -- generally simplifies higher-level coroutine coding.
Beyond that I haven't worried about it and am instead fretting
over getting just the basics working, first.

A fun problem that I found a solution for and am currently
coding is the fragmentation problem.   The splay-tree-of-gap-buffers
allows strings to be arbitrarily fragmented.    However, low-level
I/O systems (e.g., DMA, L2 and L1 caches) like the fragments
to be various minimum sizes (cache lines, pages, etc.).   A fun
set of tricks to think about is how to manage the splay-tree-of-gap-buffers
such that the majority of string/buffer data winds up being in
roughly page-sized chunks, to minimize the amount of data-copying
needed and to maximize the effectiveness of caches.

It's a fun puzzle.

-t