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Re: Request to add *-resize! functions for contiguous mutable data struc
From: |
Taylan Kammer |
Subject: |
Re: Request to add *-resize! functions for contiguous mutable data structures. |
Date: |
Sat, 7 Aug 2021 12:31:09 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.12.0 |
On 06.08.2021 16:33, Vijay Marupudi wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I was curious if Guile would be willing to provide a series of
> new procedures for resizing contiguous memory regions.
>
> (bytevector-resize! <bytevector> new-size [fill])
> (vector-resize! <vector> new-size [fill])
>
> The [fill] parameter could be used if the new-size is bigger than
> the current size.
>
> This would make writing imperative code easier and more
> performant. I acknowledge that it is not idiomatic Scheme to use
> mutable data structures, however this is useful to me for
> dealing with large amounts of text data, in which I need random
> access and flexible data storage. It would allow me to move off
> my custom C extension vector and allow me to use other
> vector-* functions.
>
> Ideally, this would use libc's `realloc` to make the resize
> quick, so that it can avoid data copying whenever possible.
>
> Regards
>
> Vijay Marupudi
> PhD Student in Human Centered-Computing
> Georgia Tech
>
Sounds like a good idea to me. I didn't know realloc() was a
thing in C (I don't write much C) and I suppose it's not possible
to implement equivalent functionality with equivalent performance
purely in Scheme.
I'm on vacation for the next three weeks and will try to write a
patch to implement this if no one beats me to it. :-)
One consideration is how this should behave in the case of
bytevectors that were created from an FFI pointer. In the FFI,
you provide a pointer and specify how long the bytevector should
be, which means it's a memory-unsafe operation. I think it would
be ideal to offer a way of forcing an in-place resize, basically
overriding the formerly provided size value. That means it's
also memory-unsafe, but in some cases that's what you want.
--
Taylan