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From: Tommy Thorn <tommy@thorn.ws>
To: Christopher Li <sparse@chrisli.org>
Cc: linux-sparse@vger.kernel.org, Josh Triplett <josh@kernel.org>,
	Codrin Alexandru Grajdeanu <grcodal@gmail.com>,
	alexey.zaytsev@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Fwd: [PATCH 0/10] Sparse linker
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:54:38 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <48BF3FDE.10300@thorn.ws> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <70318cbf0809031816m69565c5aj9417d9a2e136770d@mail.gmail.com>

Christopher Li wrote:
> I would rather not have that 4 byte prepended to every
> structure. Serialize is just one short stage of the life cycle
> of those c structures. Having the permanent extra space
> for just that is unnecessary. That 4 bytes meta data also
> limits what C structure you can work on. All you need
> is being able to map a point into some serialize object
> to keep track which object is tracked and which one is not.
>
> After you serialized the data. The meta data can be drop
> completely. So the price to pay is for every unknown object
> pointer, you need to do a dictionary look up. Only during
> the dumping stage. But that price is actually very small,
> when you dumping objects. You are mostly limit by the disk
> any way. The plus side is: you can work with any objects.
> You don't need to waste extra memory for serialization
> when you are not doing serialization. You can leave the
> object allocation code unchanged.
>   

I concur and just wanted to point out that this technique has been used 
in the garbage collector for functional languages for the same reason: 
the type information is very small and almost completely static; no need 
to replicate it all over the data. It does make marshaling (this is the 
common terminology for what Alex calls "serialization") slightly more 
complicated.

Tommy




  reply	other threads:[~2008-09-04  8:28 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2008-09-03 21:55 [PATCH 0/10] Sparse linker alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55 ` [PATCH 01/10] Serialization engine alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55   ` [PATCH 02/10] Handle -emit_code and the -o file options alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55     ` [PATCH 03/10] Check stdin if no input files given, like cc1 alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55       ` [PATCH 04/10] Add char *first_string(struct string_list *) alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55         ` [PATCH 05/10] Serializable ptr lists alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55           ` [PATCH 06/10] Linker core, serialization and helper functions alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55             ` [PATCH 07/10] Let sparse serialize the symbol table of the checked file alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55               ` [PATCH 08/10] Sparse Object Link eDitor alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55                 ` [PATCH 09/10] Rewrite cgcc, add cld and car to wrap ld and ar alexey.zaytsev
2008-09-03 21:55                   ` [PATCH 10/10] A simple demonstrational program that looks up symbols in sparse object files alexey.zaytsev
     [not found] ` <70318cbf0809031808u8610f3h4b3d53a7b76a7799@mail.gmail.com>
2008-09-04  1:16   ` Fwd: [PATCH 0/10] Sparse linker Christopher Li
2008-09-04  1:54     ` Tommy Thorn [this message]
2008-09-04  4:03     ` Alexey Zaytsev
2008-09-04  7:27       ` Christopher Li
2008-09-04  9:41         ` Alexey Zaytsev
2008-09-04 10:35           ` Christopher Li
2008-09-04 13:29             ` Alexey Zaytsev
2008-09-04 13:35               ` Alexey Zaytsev
2008-09-04 19:04                 ` Christopher Li
2008-09-04 20:21                   ` Alexey Zaytsev
2008-09-04 21:24                     ` Christopher Li
2008-09-05  9:49                       ` Alexey Zaytsev

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