Re: new module 'aligned-malloc'

[Paul Eggert]

On 7/21/20 4:29 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:

> However, the algorithm above would be _grossly_ inefficient - especially for
> bigger alignments such as 128 or 512.
I don't think performance would be that bad, for many applications at least. I 
suppose we could measure overall performance if the topic ever comes up. Of 
course this performance issue is mostly just for MS-Windows, as other major 
current platforms already have aligned_alloc or rough equivalent.

> In a lot of code I've seen, allocation and
> deallocation of some data type is done nearby in the code; then it's not
> a big burden to use xyz_free for the results of xyz_alloc.

True, and for these, aligned_malloc is OK. But I would rather not have "we 
should be compatible with aligned_malloc" leak into a bunch of other modules. As 
I see it, aligned_malloc is a crutch for MS-Windows (plus some less-important 
nonstandard platforms) and it shouldn't be driving our code or our APIs.