Proposal: Pooled memory management

[Sven Panne]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> [...] So we might well ask what useful new functionality is provided
> by a pool-style memory manager.

Well, I guess that about 90% of the hierarchical libraries don't provide
any "new" functionality, but nevertheless they provide useful
abstractions. The same holds for my proposal.

> One feature is performance: [...]

That's a nice bonus, but I didn't have that in mind.

> So, assuming the performance is roughly the same [..], do people see
> any other compelling reasons to be using pools?

I see the same compelling reasons as the ones for using foldl, sum,
sequence, mapM, when, allocArray, with, ...  :-)

> GHC's runtime has an Arena abstraction which is an implementation of
> pool-style memory management, and could be used to implement Pools,
> BTW.

Nice, I wasn't aware of that.

Cheers,
   S.