Re: [Objectivelib-discussion] Memory allocator removal?

[Daniel R. <ra...@cs...>]

That sounds like a good solution. Although potentially useful,  
allocators aren't needed, and alloc/dealloc would be consistent with  
everything else. Better to leave allocators out than try to fudge  
around with half-baked solutions.

-Daniel


On Aug 1, 2005, at 4:27 PM, Will Mason wrote:

> 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