On 26/01/2017 23:56, Raphaël Londeix wrote:
That's right, but that's not the main selling point. The idea is to be able to store raw buffers of different sizes, without any external storage or indirection. When you do
buffer* buf = rb.start_write(10);
The variable `buf' is stored inside the ring buffer, so that the commit operation only change the position of the write cursor. One possible way to do that is to define buffer as
struct buffer { size_type size; byte_type data[]; };
That sounds a bit different from what I was imagining. I have a somewhat similar ringbuffer interface (in terms of separated reserve and commit) but it assumes single-copy inside the methods; it never exposes internal buffer memory (because zero-copy gets tricky if you want to span the ringbuffer's wrap point). I've only ever used it as a block-of-bytes buffer, typically in cases where at least one end doesn't care about message boundaries and can just process bytes in arbitrary chunks.