In many situations it's desirable to refer to objects/resources by handles instead of pointers. In addition to memory safety, like detecting double free's and reference freed/reallocated memory, it allows the private implementation to hide its implementation and reorganize data without changing the public API. Andre Weissflog goes into this in great detail in Handles are the better pointers.
- detect stale handles ('use after free').
- sizeof(pointer) > sizeof(handle_type) (on 64bit architectures with 32 bit handles).
- system is free to arrange memory of resource refered by handle (ex. keep data linear in memory).
- more userflag bits available (if needed). pointers would only have a bottom bits (due to alignment) and with extra care added to mask out those bits before usage.
- one (atleast) extra indirection when using the resource externally (but in most cases more resources are touched internally than are referenced externally).
- trickier to debug/inspect individual resources.
All allocators are implemented as a stb-style header-file library and comes with unittest and usage examples.
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ijha_h32.h is a runtime configurable thread-safe FIFO/LIFO handle allocator with handles that have a user configurable number of userflags bits and variable number of generation bits. Memory usage: 4bytes / handle.
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ijss.h sparse set for bookkeeping of dense<->sparse index mapping or a building-block for a simple LIFO index/handle allocator.
Dual-licensed under 3-Clause BSD & Unlicense license.