5. AMCZ (Automatic Mostly-Copying Zero-rank)

AMCZ is a general-purpose automatically managed pool class for leaf objects (“zero-rank” objects that contain no references).

It is otherwise identical to AMC (Automatic Mostly-Copying).

AMCZ is intended for “simple” objects like numbers, characters, and strings. Segregating these objects into one or more AMCZ pools avoids the cost of scanning them that would be incurred if they were interleaved in a pool with objects containing references. It may also simplify the scanning of the objects that are left behind.

See Segregation of objects for an example.

5.1. AMCZ properties

AMCZ is identical to AMC (Automatic Mostly-Copying), except that:

• Blocks may not contain references to blocks in automatically managed pools.

• Blocks are not scanned. A consequence of this is that the pool’s object format need not provide a scan method.

• Blocks are not protected by barriers (1).

5.2. AMCZ interface

#include "mpscamc.h"

mps_pool_class_t mps_class_amcz(void)

Return the pool class for an AMCZ (Automatic Mostly-Copying Zero-rank) pool.

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

• MPS_KEY_FORMAT (type mps_fmt_t) specifies the object format for the objects allocated in the pool. The format must provide a skip method, a forward method, an is-forwarded method and a padding method.

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_INTERIOR (type mps_bool_t, default TRUE) specifies whether ambiguous interior pointers to blocks in the pool keep objects alive. If this is FALSE, then only client pointers keep objects alive.

For example:

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

5.3. AMCZ introspection

See AMC introspection.