talloc questions - bachelor thesis

[simo]

On Mon, 2012-04-16 at 10:03 +0200, Pavel Březina wrote: 
> Hello,
> I'm working on a bachelor thesis which aims to provide a tutorial and
> summary of the best practices for talloc. It is near completion and I
> would like to ask you a few questions.
> 
> 1. When it was released for public use?

The first independent release of talloc was probably in May 2009
according to the date here: https://www.samba.org/ftp/talloc/

However talloc has been part of samba for a long time and has evolved
from a simple wrapper around malloc to become the very useful
hierarchical allocator it is today. If I read git blame right the
hierarchical stuff was basically added around 2005.

> 2. What other libraries did you consider before choosing to create your
> own?

I think Tridge looked at a bunch of libraries, but ultimately none was
addressing the problems we wanted to solve.
If I remember correctly at the time Tridge mentioned he was partly
inspired by a library called halloc (Hierarchical Allocator).

> 3. What did you miss in those libraries?

No other library used the hierarchical concept which is the key for
talloc, and I think halloc was limited and had an awkward API, which
made it not really ideal to use. (but this is from memory, there may
have been other reasons I forgot)

> 4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
> any more?

This has been asked, I think your best bet is to do a web search about
talloc and see what pops up (if only google didn't kill code search ...)

> 5. Do you have any performance tests that I can reuse?

All available tests are in the talloc distribution, afaik.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>