[Objectivelib-discussion] Memory allocator removal?

[Will M. <wil...@us...>]

I'm in the process of eliminating dependencies on Cocoa/GNUstep for
ObjectiveLib. The memory allocator code barely works under
Cocoa/GNUstep, but it completely fails in an Object-based system. The
reason is that instead of using retain/release to hang onto and un-hang
onto objects, you have to copy the object and later free it. There's no
way to rely on a generic copy method for any given class that will make
use of a desired allocator, as the copy-related methods in Object have
no knowledge of ObjectiveLib memory allocators. This means that
although an OLVector, for example, can allocate its memory cache using
a given allocator, it can't copy the objects that it manages using a
given allocator. This results in half-baked memory management.

I'm considering eliminating memory allocators as they currently exist
in ObjectiveLib in favor of letting people fall back to overriding
alloc and free/dealloc in order to get specialized memory management
for a given class. This will work equally well with all ObjectiveLib
classes and all other classes, too.

I was hoping to get some feedback on this idea before I gut the system.

Thanks for any advice,
Will