Re: [boost] Proposal: Monotonic Containers

Subject: Re: [boost] Proposal: Monotonic Containers
From: Simonson, Lucanus J (lucanus.j.simonson_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-17 17:39:47

Christian Schladetsch wrote:
> These are not sweeping changes. I would consider these a normal part
> of developing a proposal. Adding a global default storage was
> absolutely trivial, and it solves any concerns people may've had
> about allocator equivalence. I should have had this in my proposal
> from the absolute start. 
> I didn't, because I never had a need for it and in my world globals
> are bad. Now that it's there, and addresses people's concerns about
> portability, everyone suddenly loses interest and leaves.
> Interesting. I was under the impression that proposals were just
> that, and were expected to be slightly modified as it was exposed to
> a wider audience. Indeed, isn't that the 
> entire point?
> 
> There is no argument against the allocator in terms of the standard
> or use 
> by older STL implementations, because monotonic::allocator<T> can be
> safely default-constructed, and all instances of default-constructed
> allocator<T> are exactly identical in every way.
> 
> To ignore significant gains from very simple code based on personal
> bias seems silly to me.

People are naturally skeptical of bold claims.  Up to now you have not make your point in a convincing manner.  People are not ignoring significant gains out of personal bias, they are ignoring bold claims because you haven't offered convincing evidence yet that your allocator in a significant improvement on what is already available.  We should be skeptical.  What makes you so much smarter than the folks at Google or Intel that have implemented good memory allocators that are faster than what ships with the compiler or the OS?  The personal bias is not against your proposal, but against the way you react defensively to constructive feedback that is part of what you rightly identify as the normal process of developing a proposal.  I can see you making an effort to be gracious, and I appreciate that, but people are getting frustrated with you because you are still going about making your proposal in the wrong way.  I actually find your idea interesting, but you haven't convinced me yet that I should use your allocator.  I believe writing your own memory pool is the last thing a developer should do these days when there are so many freely available to choose from.  I just spent half the day fixing a bug in a memory pool written five years ago that never worked when someone requests a block of size larger than the arbitrary threshold 500000000 bytes because it triggered a special case that left it with dangling pointers, a case which never happened before last week.  Do I trust you more than I trust Google to replace this legacy memory pool?  You are going to need to earn that trust.  Don't be defensive that people are skeptical, people should be skeptical.  Defensiveness does not engender trust, but rather distrust.

Regards,
Luke