Re: [PATCH 1/4] lib/printbuf: New data structure for heap-allocated strings

Kent Overstreet
2022-04-20T05:18:58Z

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 10:02:20PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 04:31:59PM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> > This adds printbufs: simple heap-allocated strings meant for building up
> > structured messages, for logging/procfs/sysfs and elsewhere. They've
> > been heavily used in bcachefs for writing .to_text() functions/methods -
> > pretty printers, which has in turn greatly improved the overall quality
> > of error messages.
>
> How does this use case differ from that of lib/seq_buf.c?

I hadn't come across that code before, thanks for pointing it out :)

seq_buf.c looks exactly like an older version of printbufs, from before I added
the auto heap allocating functionality. seq_buf.c could be dropped, I could go
ahead and convert existing users to printbufs.