Proposal: Pooled memory management

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Sven Panne <Sven.Panne at informatik.uni-muenchen.de> wrote,

> The FFI libraries currently contain support for explicit allocation
> and deallocation via the malloc/free family and support for implicit
> allocation and deallocation via alloca and friends. But there is a
> very useful level between these extremes: Pooled memory management.
> Under this scheme, (re-)allocations belong to a given pool, and
> everything in a pool is deallocated when the pool itself is
> deallocated.

To be honest, I am reluctant to add this module to the FFI
addendum.  This is not to say that the module may not be
useful and may not be a worthwhile addition to the library
hierachy.  Here are my reasons:

* I want to get v1.0 of the spec fixed.  We are really only
  in bug fix mode for quite a while and only the finalizer
  problems held us back from finishing the spec.

* I am sure there are plenty more useful FFI-related
  libraries.  However, the initial plan was to define basic
  functionality on top of which more elaborate schemes can
  be implemented.  We need to draw the line somewhere.

In particular, I don't want to add a largely untested
library.

So, I propose to add Pool to the portable libraries package,
but leave it out of the spec.

Cheers,
Manuel