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Re: New shared substring implementation
Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se> writes:
> forcer <forcer@mindless.com> writes:
>
> > Well, my thoughts about the copy-on-write idea stumbled on one
> > problem.
>
> (BTW, have you noticed the macro SCM_COERCE_SUBSTR (which for some
> strange reason is defined in symbols.h)? Generally, all operations
> which mutate strings should call this macro.)
>
> > (define str1 "foo") ; a string is allocated as usual
> > (define str2 (substring str1 0 1)) ; str2 is now a shared
> > ; substring of str1
> > (string-set! str1 0 #\b) ; since str1 is not a shared
> > ; substring, it's not copied,
> > ; and thus str2 => "b"
> >
> > A solution to this problem would be to have (substring) mark the
> > string it's applied to to be a "substring" as well. The problem
> > then is that:
> > (define str1 "foo")
> > (define str2 (substring str1 2 3)) ; str1 and str2 are marked as
> > ; shared substrings
> > (string-set! str1 0 #\b) ; str1 now points to a newly
> > ; malloc'd copy of the string,
> > ; and str2 points to the
> > ; original string[2]
> > (string-set! str2 0 #\b) ; str2 is now a copy of the
> > ; string as well, and there's
> > ; no pointer to the original
> > ; string left :]
>
> Hmm... Isn't this exactly what you want?
>
> After the second string-set!, there's no reason to keep the original
> string, so it should be freed.
Yes. The problem is, how to decide when it got to be freed. We
need something like a reference count here :]
-forcer
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