8. LO (Leaf Object)

LO is an automatically managed pool class for leaf objects (objects that contain no references). It does not move or protect its objects.

This pool class is intended for unstructured data that needs to be accessed by foreign code. It’s ideal for allocating a buffer that needs to be passed to an operating system I/O function.

Note

A thread that reads or writes from blocks allocated in this pool need not be registered with the arena so long as the liveness of the block is independent of that thread.

This means that you can launch a thread to read or write a buffer allocated in this pool, without having to register the thread, so long as you ensure that the buffer remains alive until the thread has finished (for example, by keeping a reference to the buffer in a root or a scanned object).

If LO is used to allocate large numbers of small objects, the garbage collection performance will degrade. For leaf objects that can move and be protected, it is better to use AMCZ (Automatic Mostly-Copying Zero-rank) instead.

8.1. LO properties

8.2. LO interface

#include "mpsclo.h"
mps_pool_class_t mps_class_lo(void)

Return the pool class for an LO (Leaf Object) pool.

When creating an LO pool, mps_pool_create_k() requires one keyword argument:

It accepts two optional keyword arguments:

  • MPS_KEY_CHAIN (type mps_chain_t) specifies the generation chain for the pool. If not specified, the pool will use the arena’s default chain.

  • MPS_KEY_GEN (type unsigned) specifies the generation in the chain into which new objects will be allocated. If you pass your own chain, then this defaults to 0, but if you didn’t (and so use the arena’s default chain), then an appropriate generation is used.

    Note that LO does not use generational garbage collection, so blocks remain in this generation and are not promoted.

For example:

MPS_ARGS_BEGIN(args) {
    MPS_ARGS_ADD(args, MPS_KEY_FORMAT, fmt);
    res = mps_pool_create_k(&pool, arena, mps_class_lo(), args);
} MPS_ARGS_END(args);