Benchmark Allocation Ratios

[Ratstail91]

Right now, the first container allocations set the capacity to about 8 (and other min values), but after that, the capacity is doubled each time.

It's possible that later allocations may need smaller increases in space, if the users aren't filling the structures to their maximum capacity very often.

There's a mathematical principle behind this, but I can't remember the details.

[Ratstail91]

The following structures have internal memory allocations:

• Toy_Array
• Toy_Table
• Toy_Stack
• Toy_Bucket

Toy_String also uses malloc(), but only does so when generating a raw buffer with Toy_getStringRawBuffer(), so it's not counted.

Some quick notes:

Toy_Array is not yet used, so there's a possibility that it could be changed to have Toy_Value as it's internal data type. It would also bring it into line with the other basic containers.

Toy_Table is wrapped by Toy_Scope - this design was intentional, and seems to be working well, though the scopes to fiddle with the table's internals. Toy_Table will expand when it reaches 80% capacity.

Toy_Stack was designed to act as the program stack of the VM, but it could be potentially added as a data type within Toy.

Toy_Bucket is a custom allocator structure. It was originally intended only to support Toy_Ast, but has been extended to other parts of the codebase, including strings. In addition, there are some restrictions to using the buckets:

• It can only expand until it is freed
• It cannot be copied or moved around in memory
• It cannot allocate a block of memory larger than it's capacity*

(*capacity refers to a single element within the bucket structure - if any element runs out of space, a new bucket is automatically added to the linked list, so the overall system has no maximum value outside of hardware restrictions.)

Toy_Bucket may leave unused space.

Things to be benchmarked:

• Initial sizes of each container
• Expansion rates of each container
• Expansion thresholds of each container

Prerequisites:

• Toy_Array should hold an array of Toy_Value
• Add #ifndef definitions to the allocation parameters.

[Ratstail91]

Closing this as unneeded.