busy work
there's not much to do in pennsylvania. it's not like the little league world series was going on or anything. sigh. should have done some recruiting. yeah, that's it. a long time ago i wrote a memory manager. it's great feature was it allocated and freed memory in constant time. it's pretty interesting if you, like me, like tackling hard problems for fun. it was kinda dated. so i rewrote it. i came across a technique that would make it much gooder. and it is. the original version wasn't thread safe. i made it thread safe by slapping in a global mutex. it's not pretty. but it works. the new version will be better. i got plans. now i just need the time. wee. yeah okay. you really don't want a low priority thread to block a high priority thread and give all the time to the middle priority threads. heh. the trick to using locks is to minimize the time the lock is held. like don't hold a lock long enough to make a function call. good rule of thumb. the other feature i'd want to add is multiple pools. so each thread can have its own private pool. in which case, no locks would be needed. pretty cool huh?