Operations

Mulling over allocator-related operations, current traits, possible future traits, etc.

Parameterization

Init flavor:

• Zeroed (always available by combining alloc with memset)
• Debug Pattern Filled (always available by combining alloc with e.g. memset)
• Uninit (always available, but might use an alternative memory flavor)

Sizing:

• NonZeroUsize | NonZeroU32 - always available, but may OOM
• usize | u32 - may always fail for some allocators. Rounding up to size 1 via adapters is sane, but not for FFI allocators, which might be incompatible with sized frees.
• (element_size, element_count) - some allocators expose this directly

Alignment:

• Runtime Parameter (e.g. alloc(size: ..., align: Alignment))
• Generic Parameter (e.g. alloc<const A : Alignment>(size: ...)
• Implied by object type (e.g. alignof(CONTEXT) → 16)
• Implied by object size (e.g. 1 → 1, 9001 → alignof(max_align_t)) Common for C/C++ consumers, unthinkable for Rust consumers.

Pointerage:

• Never-dangling
• Non-null, but can dangle
• Nullable

Operations

• alloc
• resize - comes in several flavors: zst friendly, zst unfriendly, and resize_or_free
• free
• query (size, stats, info, metadata, ...)
• debug checks (validation, ...)