[webkit-dev] Arena is crufty?

[Chris Marrin]

Ken's PODRedBlackTree patch has made me go back and take a closer look at WebKit's Arena "class". Turns out it's not a class at all, just some structs and macros. That seems very un-WebKit-like to me. Ken's patch also has a PODArena class, which uses Arena in its implementation. Sam suggests that PODRedBlackTree should really go into WTF, which means PODArena and Arena would need to go there as well.

It seems like Arena really needs to be brought into the 21st century and made a proper class. Maybe now is the right time to:

1) Make Arena a class

2) Integrate Ken's PODArena functionality into this new Arena class (or maybe just make Ken's PODArena the new Arena class).

3) Move the new Arena class to WTF

4) Put PODRedBlackTree in WTF

It looks like RenderArena is currently the only client of Arena.h, so this change shouldn't be too hard. Of course, looking at RenderArena, it's a little odd, too. It is not renderer specific at all. It's just an Arena that recycles freed objects. Maybe we should move that functionality into the new Arena class. But RenderArena is used all over the place, so maybe that's going one step too far down this road?

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~Chris
cmarrin at apple.com