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this has been delivered with the 5.2 update of 12 Dec
thanks for the reply, we'll raise AREA etc if not enough storage, but we won't name it FASTALLOC - it might not always be faster
Given that I originally suggested the enhancement of the ALLOC() builtin to allow the fast clean-up of trees and lists (via AREA=EMPTY()", the current RFE should make the allocations as fast as possible, given the fact that the trees resulting from parsing XML might be substantial.
A pure inline solution would be the best, but it should definitely generate the AREA condition if not enough space is available, so that the program can then take corrective action, such as moving the AREA to a larger one, or allocating a new one (if the original is CONTROLLED), so that upon return from the condition handler the repeated ALLOC would succeed. However, I would expect most users to empirically tune the the size of the AREA to be used for building the tree to based on actual data to prevent this from ever happening.
A compiler option to allow the compiler to generate code to actually call the current library routine to scan for free space might be useful, but given the fact that it's somewhat unlikely that branches or leafs of an XML tree would be deleted in the middle of parsing the XML input, it might be superfluous, but a "*PROCESS DEFAULT(NEXTALLOC(NOSCAN/SCAN))" would give users a choice, with "NOSCAN" the default.
And NEXTALLOC is a much better name!
I would prefer to do this via a new BIF called ALLOCNEXT, as in ALLOCNEXT( n, a ) where n is an amount and a the area in which to allocate n bytes. It would try to get the n bytes from the next/first available space and would do that inline. But I have a question: should it raise STORAGE or AREA if that bit is too small? or should it generate the loop of code and library call it normally generates if that bit is to small? the latter would produce more code of course and might duplicate what's already available. But it also provides more function. Any preferences??