[Geany-Devel] On document pointer recycling

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 24.10.2013 10:22, schrieb Lex Trotman:
>
>
>
> On 24 October 2013 18:39, Thomas Martitz 
> <thomas.martitz at student.htw-berlin.de 
> <mailto:thomas.martitz at student.htw-berlin.de>> wrote:
>
>     Am 24.10.2013 05:39, schrieb Lex Trotman:
>
>
>
>         PS On the recycling of doc structures and doc->is_valid, this
>         does have the advantage (for a structure where miscellaneous
>         pointers to the structure are going to exist in Geany and
>         plugins) that doc pointers will always point to a
>         geanydocument struct.  So the is_valid test is always right.
>          If the memory was returned and re-cycled into some other
>         struct, the old doc pointers could point to anything, and
>         could just as easily appear a valid document.  So its safer
>         than the alternative, but the requirement to check is_valid
>         really does need more visibility since its an unusual idiom.
>
>
>     The recycling & is_valid thing is completely bogus. It is wastes
>     memory unnecessarily.
>
>
> Agreed.  I wasn't meaning to sound like I was defending it. I was just 
> pointing out that one of its side effects.

Yes you sounded like that.

>     I vote for removing this idiom and transition the documents array
>     to a GList which gives other nice advantages.
>
>
> Unfortunately there is an accessor document_index() in the plugin 
> interface that uses the index into the array.
>
> Switching to a list means that there needs to be a change everywhere 
> in Geany and the plugins that the array index is used instead of a 
> pointer.  I don't see anywhere where the index is used inside Geany 
> but I may have missed somewhere.  I don't know how often its used by 
> plugins.  But again its use could be deprecated and a temporary map 
> (eg g_tree) from an int to the pointer could be used until plugins are 
> modified.
>
> All the places where Geany and plugins iterate over the document list 
> also needs to be replaced by a loop using g_list_first() and 
> g_list_next(). I count 12 or 13 such places in Geany itself, but I 
> don't know how many there are in plugins.
>
> Its certainly not a one line change, but may not be huge, depending on 
> the plugins use of the index.  However I wouldn't call it a high 
> priority change, even a thousand geanydocument structs isn't much 
> memory compared to the amount Scintilla uses :)
>


Okay, but you still agree that doc->is_valid should be removed 
eventually? That's a step forward :)

Best regards.