Re: [PATCH 3/7] merge-ort: add pool_alloc, pool_calloc, and pool_strndup wrappers

On Thu, Jul 29, 2021 at 08:27:51PM -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:

quoted

FWIW, I had the same thought. You can also provide a helper to make the
freeing side nicer:

  static void mem_pool_free(struct mem_pool *m, void *ptr)
  {
        if (m)
                return; /* will be freed when pool frees */
        free(ptr);
  }

We do something similar with unuse_commit_buffer(), where the caller
isn't aware of we pulled the buffer from cache or allocated it
especially for them.

Having a paired function may help one side, but I worry that the name
(mem_pool_free) might introduce some confusion of its own -- "Why is
there a mem_pool_free() function, isn't the point of memory pools to
not need to individually free things?"  Or, "Why are they freeing the
pool here and what's the extra parameter?"

Yeah, "mem_pool_maybe_free" or something might explain it. But...

I'm not sure I see the right way to address that, so I think I'm going
to leave this part out of my series and let someone else add such
changes on top if they feel motivated to do so.

That's fine, especially as dropping the conditiona USE_MEMORY_POOL flag
means these functions will go away entirely.

-Peff