[zeromq-dev] On hooking memory allocations

[Auer, Jens]

Hi,

I am just a user, but I would love to see this change. I have thinking about this and I would like to be able to pass a C++ allocator object to ZeroMQ, so a simple function hook is not enough. My idea is to define a struct in the interface

struct allocator_t
{
    void* hint;
    void* (allocate)(size_t, void*);
    void (deallocate)(void*, size_t, void*);
};

and store this in the context object. Since I don't think that this should be changed during runtime, I would create a new zmq_ctx_new overload which takes a parameter of type allocator_t. The default value would be to call malloc/free.

Cheers,
Jens

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________________________________
Von: zeromq-dev [zeromq-dev-bounces at lists.zeromq.org]" im Auftrag von "Petteri Salo [petteri.salo at gmail.com]
Gesendet: Montag, 28. November 2016 09:40
An: zeromq-dev at lists.zeromq.org
Betreff: [zeromq-dev] On hooking memory allocations

Hello,

Let me first do a little introduction as I'm new to this list. I'm a software engineer with 15+ years of experience working on games at a company called Remedy Entertainment Ltd. We've done games for PC, and various games consoles over the years. Most recently we did Quantum Break for Xbox One.

I've now been tasked with evaluating ZeroMQ. One important feature of any library we use in games is the ability to hook all memory allocations - this is to allow the use of custom memory allocators and/or for tracking when and where memory is allocated.

I've searched the libzmq source code and there is about 150 uses of new, malloc, realloc , etc.

If we were to adopt libzmq we'd like to put in allocation hooks and that work would then be something that we'd like to contribute back to the project. Having those hooks in the main repository would then make it easier for us to adopt future changes to the library.

So, my question is would this kind of change be something that would be accepted? Of course assuming that coding conventions, proper way of submitting the patch etc. are followed. I do realize that one would want to see the actual code before accepting. I'm interested in the principle of accepting a change such as this, since it would introduce a new "rule" for working ión libzmq source code : "All allocations shall go through an allocation hook."

Best Regards,

Petteri Salo


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