My Easter project is to look into the FixedBooleanArray and ResizableBooleanArray PMC. As the name implies, a *BooleanArray is an array of boolean values. This functionality could be achieved with a *PMCArray of Boolean PMCs. However this wastes a lot of memory, as a bool really just needs a single bit.
Currently there is a minimal implemention from Matt Fowles. The downside of the current implementation is that a bool is stored in an INTVAL. This means that 31, or 63, bits are wasted per bool.
Making the current implementation to use 1 bit per bool should be straightforword. But as laziness if one of my virtues, it would be nice if somebody has already done the work. My first idea was to steal the code from Perl5's Bit::Vector. This module looks very nice and very complete, with a lot of tests. Bit::Vector is XS-based and the C-code can also be used without Perl. The downside is that the C-library is under GPL, which makes it hard to incorporate in Parrot.
The docs of Bit::Vector mentions that the module is also a big integer math library. Well, a bit vector is really the same as a big integer. Thus it would be economical, if the BigInt PMC and the *BooleanArray PMC have the same implementation in Parrot
The BigInt PMC is implemented by calling out to GMP, the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library. When there is no GMP, than a fallback implementation jumps in. Of course, all the methods needed for *BooleanArray are already implemented in GMP.
So that's the plan:
Re:Undef?
Bernhard on 2005-04-04T07:58:11
Well, basically it is up to you, as the standard PMCs are a design matter.
However, if BooleanArray should keep track of definedness, then I propose to have a BitVector PMC with the current behavior.
What is also missing for PMCs, is a standard way of passing setup params. For the FixedBooleanArray it would be nice to pass an initial size and an initial storage size. Thus an FixedBooleanArray could start with a size of 0 and grow up to the allocated size.
