Re: [PATCH 1/3] Added generic string handling code.

From: Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi>
Date: May 20, 2007, 10:27 UTC
Message-ID: <B5F56D1C-4EC2-4A79-9489-B4F1C9FC9BA7@iki.fi>
In-Reply-To: <20070520100155.GB3106@steel.home>

On 20.5.2007, at 13.01, Alex Riesen wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Timo Sirainen, Sun, May 20, 2007 04:24:29 +0200:
>> So here's my try on starting with something simple. Unlike almost all
>> other string handling libraries, it doesn't allocate the memory
>> dynamically.
>
> Sometimes you _need_ dinamic memory allocation.

It's easy to use the same str_*() functions to implement dynamic memory allocation. I think I could have done a bit different naming, like maybe:

extern struct string *str_alloc(unsigned int len); extern void str_append(struct string *str, const char *cstr);

#define static_string(name, size) .. #define sstr_append(str, cstr) str_append(&(str).string, cstr)

Show 7 quoted lines

>> This makes it really easy to convert existing code to use it. I'm
>> including some example changes in the other patches. Besides making
>> the code safer, it can also make it faster, especially those
>> strcat() replacements.
>
> It is also bigger, heavier on stack and sometimes slower because of
> more function calls involved.

I would hardly call 8 extra bytes on stack heavier. Also if this was used everywhere I wouldn't be surprised if it made the code faster, because it would remove a lot of overflow checking code so more code will fit into L1 cache.