Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from September 2014
Currently there are two copy-on-write implementations in the core, enabled
by the PERL_OLD_COPY_ON_WRITE and PERL_NEW_COPY_ON_WRITE macros.
The old one was originally called called PERL_COPY_ON_WRITE, but was
renamed to PERL_OLD_COPY_ON_WRITE in 2005, and was never enabled by
default; while PERL_NEW_COPY_ON_WRITE was added for 5.18.0 and enabled by
default in 5.20.0.
The old one was Nicholas's baby (IIRC), and did its sharing by using the
IV field of a PVIV to hold a circle of pointers to the SVs that share the
same PV buffer; while the new one is FC's, and uses a spare byte in the PV
buffer itself to hold a ref count.
The code in places in sv.c etc is currently very messy, with a lot of
stuff like
#ifdef PERL_OLD_COPY_ON_WRITE
...
#elif defined(PERL_NEW_COPY_ON_WRITE)
...
else
...
#endif
I don't know whether the PERL_OLD_COPY_ON_WRITE code even works any more.
I propose that we strip all the PERL_OLD_COPY_ON_WRITE chunks from the
core.
--
I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Thread Next