Re: [boost] interest in a stateful pointer library?

Subject: Re: [boost] interest in a stateful pointer library?
From: Christof Donat (cd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-10-02 10:37:57

Hi,

Am 02.10.2017 10:46, schrieb Hans Dembinski via Boost:
> I wrote a variant of std::unique_ptr, called tagged_ptr, which allows
> safe read/write access to a customisable number of bits in the pointer
> variable. You can find the library on github:
> 
> https://github.com/HDembinski/stateful_pointer

I don't have a current use, but I think, it might be very useful in 
memory constraint environments.

> One needs little imagination to find good use for those bits. As a
> proof of principle, I wrote an STL compatible string class which has
> the size of const char*, but can store up to 7 ASCII characters (on a
> 64 bit system) without allocating any memory on the heap (aka small
> string optimisation).

I understand, that this is only an example, but...

I have not yet written a STL compatible string class, nor have I taken 
my time to look at existing implementations. Therefore I might be 
completely wrong. In my understanding, it would contain a size_t 
together with the const char*, so it will always be 16 bytes on a 64 Bit 
system and you can have up to 14 chars plus one null byte without heap 
allocation.

Christof