Seastar's gate utility
There are a few common scenarios that arise when using Seastar that require
controlling the lifetime of resources referenced by asynchronous fibers (e.g.
background fibers). In each of these cases it is generally necessary to wait
until all possible references have been released before destroying a resource.
This situation arises often enough that Seastar provides the seastar::gate
utility which implements an easy-to-use pattern for solving the problem.
Weak pointers in Seastar
In a previous post I discussed Seastar’s shared pointer type for managing a shared resource using reference counting. In this post I am going to discuss another smart pointer type provided by Seastar called a weak pointer. A weak pointer is similar to a shared pointer, but the twist is that the pointer does not have any influence over the lifetime of the resource it references, and as a result, may be invalidated at any moment!
Seastar's temporary buffer
In this post we’ll take a look at Seastar’s temporary_buffer utility for efficiently managing contiguous regions of memory. Many Seastar interfaces pass around data using this utility, and applications often use the temporary_buffer as a building block for higher level memory management abstractions.
Seastar's deleter utility
In this post we are going to discuss a Seastar utility
called seastar::deleter that is used for managing the lifetime of data. In
many ways a deleter can be thought of as a unified approach to RAII for both
raw memory pointers and objects, but it also adds other goodies like
reference counting and deleter chaining.
Smart pointers in Seastar
Seastar contains a lot of custom utilities designed to work in the context of Seastar applications. In this post we’ll take a look at the shared pointer utility provided by Seastar, and see how it offers a performance advantage by avoiding atomic operations.
