thingbuf

FAQs

• Q: Why did you make this?

A: For tracing, I wanted to be able to send formatted log lines to a dedicated worker thread that writes them to a file. Right now, we do this using crossbeam-channel. However, this has the sad disadvantage that we have to allocate Strings, send them through the channel to the writer, and immediately drop them. It would be nice to do this while reusing those allocations. Thus...StringBuf.

• Q: Is it lock-free?

A: Extremely.

• Q: Is it wait-free?

A: As long as you don't use the APIs that wait :)

• Q: Why is there only a bounded variant?

A: Because unbounded queues are of the Devil.

• Q: Isn't this just a giant memory leak?

A: If you use it wrong, yes.

• Q: Why is it called that?

A: Originally, I imagined it as a kind of ring buffer, so (as a pun on "ringbuf"), I called it "stringbuf". Then, I realized you could do this with more than just strings. In fact, it can be generalized to arbitrary...things. So, "thingbuf".