Go winnage (was: Re: REFCLOCK rises again)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> Eric said:
> > I meant to mention that there are actually *two* big benefits in prospect
> > from a Go port.  The obvious one is being able to junk a lot of fiddly,
> > error-prone C memory-management stuff. 
> 
> I'm actually surprised that you haven't simplified a lot of that yet.

Don't be.  Yes, I'm good at reduction surgery and enjoy it, but there
are some parts of it that fill even me with trepidation, and messing
with *working* dynamic allocation is one of them.  It's an area where
mistakes are easy (the invariants are hard to track with a Mark I
brain) and bugs can be subtle and difficult.  I do it when I have to but
*only* when I have to.

> There are several places where a clump of things is allocated with one call to 
> malloc and put on an internal free list.  The only one that I know of where 
> that makes sense is the mrulist slots.
> 
> We should collect a list of them.

Or we should accelerate toward Go and nuke the whole problem flat that way.
I know which approach *I* prefer.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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