Is the purpose of reclaim here purely to ensure that we don't use astronomical amounts of memory?
jkorn
Right, and to avoid memory leaks. I suppose you could free everything at the end when you are done using the data structure, but I think the idea is that this is something that will be used for a while (i.e. a work queue), so that's probably not the best solution.
paramecinm
Reclaim is to make sure that the allocation and deletion are performed by the same thread.
aperiwal
Here, pop just moves the head to the next element in the queue without deleting it. The delete is done later by push(using the reclaim pointer). Thus, only one thread handles the insertion and deletion of the ndoes.
pdp
Is the allocation and deletion done by the same thread because of new and delete not being thread safe? Because, pop has a head!=tail condition which will prevent that thread deleting the location accessed by the push thread anyways.
kayvonf
To everyone: The purpose of this design is to make sure the same thread is allocating and deleting memory used by the queue -- allowing for a non-thread safe allocator to be used. This can be important, since a thread safe allocator might be implemented using locks, and the point of this queue's design was the avoid locks.
Is the purpose of reclaim here purely to ensure that we don't use astronomical amounts of memory?
Right, and to avoid memory leaks. I suppose you could free everything at the end when you are done using the data structure, but I think the idea is that this is something that will be used for a while (i.e. a work queue), so that's probably not the best solution.
Reclaim is to make sure that the allocation and deletion are performed by the same thread.
Here, pop just moves the head to the next element in the queue without deleting it. The delete is done later by push(using the reclaim pointer). Thus, only one thread handles the insertion and deletion of the ndoes.
Is the allocation and deletion done by the same thread because of new and delete not being thread safe? Because, pop has a head!=tail condition which will prevent that thread deleting the location accessed by the push thread anyways.
To everyone: The purpose of this design is to make sure the same thread is allocating and deleting memory used by the queue -- allowing for a non-thread safe allocator to be used. This can be important, since a thread safe allocator might be implemented using locks, and the point of this queue's design was the avoid locks.