code review 5557072: encoding/varint: deleted WriteXvarint

encoding/varint: deleted WriteXvarint

Fixes issue 2748.

[gri, 2012-01-20 18:58:45]

Hello rsc, r (cc: golang-dev@googlegroups.com),

I'd like you to review this change to
https://code.google.com/p/go

[r, 2012-01-20 19:04:34]

LGTM but wait for rsc.

[rsc, 2012-01-20 19:10:15]

I still think we should delete this outright.
The new comments amount to

// Don't use this function if you want your code to run fast.

Is that really something we want in the standard
library?

One malloc per integer write is an incredible amount
of garbage generation.

Russ

[gri, 2012-01-20 19:17:25]

If I write an int x using fmt.Fprint(w, x), don't I have a malloc,
too? Isn't it the same?
- gri

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org> wrote:
> I still think we should delete this outright.
> The new comments amount to
>
> // Don't use this function if you want your code to run fast.
>
> Is that really something we want in the standard
> library?
>
> One malloc per integer write is an incredible amount
> of garbage generation.
>
> Russ

[r2, 2012-01-20 19:19:39]

On Jan 20, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Robert Griesemer wrote:

> If I write an int x using fmt.Fprint(w, x), don't I have a malloc,
> too? Isn't it the same?

No. That requires no allocation.

-rob

[rsc, 2012-01-20 20:00:30]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 14:17, Robert Griesemer <gri@golang.org> wrote:
> If I write an int x using fmt.Fprint(w, x), don't I have a malloc,
> too? Isn't it the same?

fmt.Fprint is doing caching under the covers to avoid this malloc.
These routines could do caching too, but given that there are
no callers, it seems even easier to just delete them.

Read and Write are paired operations but not symmetric operations,
so it is okay to have different APIs for both.
If we delete WriteVarint then it can be recreated easily and more
efficiently by callers from the remaining API (and no one is using
it anyway); if we delete ReadVarint then it cannot be recreated
by callers from the remaining API.

WriteVarint would make sense if there were an io.ByteWriter, but
there isn't, and it is too late to be adding things like that.
I would prefer to just delete these, and then we have flexibility
to do something new in Go 1 if the need should arise.

Russ

[gri, 2012-01-20 20:33:22]

Hello rsc@golang.org, r@golang.org, r@google.com (cc:
golang-dev@googlegroups.com),

Please take another look.

[rsc, 2012-01-20 20:46:49]

LGTM

[gri, 2012-01-20 20:57:55]

*** Submitted as f790e7da73c4 ***

encoding/varint: deleted WriteXvarint

Fixes issue 2748.

R=rsc, r, r
CC=golang-dev
http://codereview.appspot.com/5557072