git/Documentation/technical/api-allocation-growing.txt
Junio C Hamano 530e741c72 Start preparing the API documents.
Most of them are still stubs, but the procedure to build the HTML
documentation, maintaining the index and installing the end product are
there.

I placed names of people who are likely to know the most about the topic
in the stub files, so that volunteers will know whom to ask questions as
needed.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2007-12-14 22:29:38 -08:00

35 lines
935 B
Plaintext

allocation growing API
======================
Dynamically growing an array using realloc() is error prone and boring.
Define your array with:
* a pointer (`ary`) that points at the array, initialized to `NULL`;
* an integer variable (`alloc`) that keeps track of how big the current
allocation is, initialized to `0`;
* another integer variable (`nr`) to keep track of how many elements the
array currently has, initialized to `0`.
Then before adding `n`th element to the array, call `ALLOC_GROW(ary, n,
alloc)`. This ensures that the array can hold at least `n` elements by
calling `realloc(3)` and adjusting `alloc` variable.
------------
sometype *ary;
size_t nr;
size_t alloc
for (i = 0; i < nr; i++)
if (we like ary[i] already)
return;
/* we did not like any existing one, so add one */
ALLOC_GROW(ary, nr + 1, alloc);
ary[nr++] = value you like;
------------
You are responsible for updating the `nr` variable.