Item — HN Reader

No, not alloca, I mean a stack allocator as you push / pop memory scopes.

The trailing body macro is something I think you should try out before dismissing it. It's similar to how Ruby can do it, with the closures exiting the "outer scope", which is unusual.

1 comments

You keep saying "stack allocator" but you haven't been specific and said if you mean allocating on the stack or allocating on the heap and freeing memory based on the stack.

I'm not dismissing the trailing body macro approach, I just don't see what advantage it has over destructors which is a well worn solution. It seems like some of the design decisions are based off of 'don't do something that C++ does'

A stack allocator is an allocator that aside from allocate, has a push and a pop function. Image an arena allocator (aka bump allocator), where ”push” stores the current start of free memory, and ”pop” resets to this point, erasing all allocations between push and pop. This is a stack allocator.

It is similar to the function stack, but push and pop can be arbitrarily granular, as opposed to only happening at entry/exit.