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by geophile
3477 days ago
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His favored solution introduces subtlety and complexity. Remember that 20-year old binary search bug in the JDK a few years ago? That is the sort of bug that could be lurking in this solution. I understand not wanting to waste one slot. A third variable (first, last, count) isn't too bad. But if you really hate that third variable, why not just use first and count variables? You can then compute last from first and count, and the two boundary cases show up as count = 0 and count = capacity. |
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I think he addressed that in the post:
The most common use for ring buffers is for it to be the intermediary between a concurrent reader and writer (be it two threads, to processes sharing memory, or a software process communicating with hardware). And for that, the index + size representation is kind of miserable. Both the reader and the writer will be writing to the length field, which is bad for caching. The read index and the length will also need to always be read and updated atomically, which would be awkward.