Meeting: Nov 27, 2019

[Wodann]

Action items:

• Give feedback on @TimDiekmann's allocator repository. (@kabergstrom will champion Done by @Wodann)
• Review and discuss state of input handling.
• Investigate possibility for standardising more core concepts
  • thread pools (@Lokathor)
• Host AreWeGameYet and transfer domains (@ozkriff)
• minimal frame allocator with bump allocation and a reset function.

[Lokathor]

action item: minimal frame allocator with bump allocation and a reset function.

[Lokathor]

possiblity: adding "crate assumptions" metadata in crates.io or on the ecosystem guide. Eg: "uses thread local storage", "uses threads", etc

[Lokathor]

action item assignment: I will ask around about thread pool unification.

[Lokathor]

Started an issue for the minimal bump alloc: #71

[Lokathor]

"global thread pools": withoutboats posted this, which seems very related, https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1195030095800471552

[Lokathor]

Meeting is tomorrow

Reminder

The meeting is scheduled for 18:00 UTC

Which, because of daylight savings changes, is now 1 hour different from the time we were meeting in the summer!

Updated times for some time zones:

• 10am Pacific Standard Time
• 11am Mountain Standard Time
• 12pm Central Standard Time
• 1pm Eastern Standard Time
  --
• 6pm Greenwich Mean Time
• 7pm Central European Time

and so on!

[Lokathor]

(We can discuss if we should make the meeting times follow daylight savings and such, but currently the readme's stance is clear that we don't follow daylight savings)

[Wodann]

I implemented a bump allocator using the alloc-wg's traits.

To achieve that I proposed some changes in this PR.

[Lokathor]

aclysma wanted #44 to get some talk, it's been sitting a while

will probably have to get updated some before we can merge it.

[Lokathor]

It was just me and wodann this time.

Notes:

• Talked about Bump Allocator stuff.
  • saftey of resetting the allocator
  • allocating trait objects (validity invariants?)
• Talked about License wrangling (forum topic)
  • From Lokathor: Please consider adding OR Zlib to the license sections of all of your crates!
• Talked about thread pools, and making a common thread pool interface.
  • tokio, async-std, rayon/crossbeam, thread-pool?
  • reminder from last meeting: "thread locals don't work across shared libraries", breaks rayon

[95th]

@Wodann You may be interested in my fork of bumpalo using alloc-wg crate. I didn't need alloc-wg's traits to take immutable self.

[Wodann]

@95th Nice! I had another look to see why we might have a discrepancy, but my version of the bump allocator is a generic that accepts any allocator that implements the BuildAllocRef, DeallocRef and AllocRef. Bumpalo just uses a static alloc function.

When using a generic, the AllocRef::alloc(&mut self, ...) function would force Bumpalo's Bump::alloc(...) to be a mutable reference as well. I think that is where it breaks down.

[95th]

That static fn remained from original implementation. I have implemented alloc wg traits here so you can pass immutable reference &Bump in alloc generic collections.

For example: https://github.com/95th/bumpalo/blob/15aa51d51f730e7a271cc16917671dd6fdcb445c/tests/string.rs#L8