[webkit-dev] Arena is crufty?

[James Robinson]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Chris Marrin <cmarrin at apple.com> wrote:

>
> 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?
>

I'm pretty sure we want to delete RenderArena (since
the minuscule-to-negative performance gain is not worth the extra
complexity) at some point anyway.  If that is still the case, then maybe it
makes more sense to have PODArena be the only arena class in WebKit.

I'm not sure we have to move PODArena / PODRedBlackTree to WTF right away,
but it can't hurt.  My gut feeling is that historically most classes that
think they want Arenas actually do not need the extra complexity and we
shouldn't encourage more users of arena classes without some discussion.  I
actually prefer having PODArena be an implementation detail of
PODRedBlackTree and not exposed as a general utility until we have a clear
need for something else to use it.

- James



> -----
> ~Chris
> cmarrin at apple.com
>
>
>
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