Re: Ropes and String Formatting

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

Hello Russell,

First of all, don't get discouraged if you get no feedback, but it is really hard to get feedback in most communities if you present a proposal with no code.

Note that you are asking our thoughts before you even mention what would be the benefits of GRopes, so it is really hard for us to judge its advantages over the ADTs we already have.

In any case, I will encourage you to go ahead and write GRope as a standalone library (libgrope?), right after that, try to find a good usecase where you can show its benefits compared to other solutions.

It seems to me that GRope could be a nice way to implement GtkTextBuffer, (obviously, this is in theory).

As an excercise, once you have GRope implemented, port GtkTextBuffer so that it uses GRope underneath and write some benchmarks to check whether it is worth using it.

If you achieve a better GtkTextBuffer using GRope, rest assured that it will be considered seriously by the GLib community.

And if GRope doesn't happen to improve GtkTextBuffer, I am sure that you will learn a lot of valuable lessons along the way.

Please keep us posted if you make any advancements, and don't be discouraged by the lack of response, just note that including GLib is a bit of a big deal, but that doesn't mean that you cannot write a GRope implementation that rocks and can be useful to a lot of people, so go ahead!

2012/5/21 Russell Harmon <russ eatnumber1 com>

I'm looking to implement two things which I think would be quite useful if included in glib.

- Ropes [1]

- Custom string formatting helper routines

What are people's thoughts on this? I was doing a little prototyping and was having trouble deciding whether to have the string formatting helper routines take and return ropes (which would be algorithmically faster), or take and return gchar *s which would probably be faster on very small strings, depending on the specifics of the implementation. Or, do you guys not worry about performance on that level?

I was also wondering about what you guys' policy on code simplicity vs performance is. String formatting routines (that take and return a gchar *) could be implemented relatively easily, but would be very inefficient with calls to realloc() on every conversion, or could be implemented much more efficiently but with a great deal more code. You can see an example of this in some code I wrote last year, [2] although I think I can do better than this example by a great deal.

Lastly, would you guys even be interested in ropes and string formatting routines at all?

Thanks
Russell Harmon

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(computer_science)

[2]: https://github.com/eatnumber1/getmntinfo/blob/master/getmntinfo.c#L314

_______________________________________________
gtk-devel-list mailing list
gtk-devel-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list

--
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz