Hacker News Reader

1. The current version of the library contains a profound design flaw - it allocates memory.

What do you mean by that?, or could you elaborate how will you design it to not allocate any heap memory?

The design of memory access behaviour is absolutely paramount in high performance software. Such software has a great deal of time and effort invested in the design to minimize memory accesses and, where they must occur, to make them cache friendly - for example, ensuring the buffer used for something being read from is allocated next to the buffer being used to write to, so they will both be covered by a single TLB lookup. This requires complete control over memory allocation. A library which not only makes its own allocations but even more staggeringly at run-time, is beyond the pale - absolutely unusable.

The next release performs no memory allocation; all allocation is performed by the user and passed into the function calls as pointers to those allocations.

Users can still of course perform run-time allocations if they wish, but now they can also fully pre-allocate, in ways which are memory access friendly given the work being performed by their software.

Interesting choice. One is still able to add a module that wraps the calls with a custom allocator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com