chickadee » lolevel » object-evict

Copies the object X recursively into the memory pointed to by the foreign pointer object returned by ALLOCATOR. The freshly copied object is returned. ALLOCATOR should be a procedure of a single argument (the number of bytes to allocate), and defaults to allocate.

This facility allows moving arbitrary objects into static memory, but care should be taken when mutating evicted data: setting slots in evicted vector-like objects to non-evicted data is not allowed. It is possible to set characters/bytes in evicted strings or byte-vectors, though. It is advisable not to evict ports, because they might be mutated by certain file-operations. object-evict is able to handle circular and shared structures.

Evicted symbols are no longer unique: a fresh copy of the symbol is created, so

(define x 'foo)
(define y (object-evict 'foo))
y                              ==> foo
(eq? x y)                      ==> #f
(define z (object-evict '(bar bar)))
(eq? (car z) (cadr z))         ==> #t

This loss of uniqueness also implies that an evicted structure -- such as one created with define-record -- cannot be operated on with the existing predicate or accessors, as internally a symbol is used to denote the type:

(define-record point x y)
(point? (make-point x y))                  ; => #t
(point? (object-evict (make-point x y)))   ; => #f