My next phase of Deadwood development consists of some significant under-the-hood changes to the code that handles "dictionary" variables. Right now, the code is a simple list that doesn't scale; indeed,
upstream_servers can only have a maximum of 96 elements.
My plan is to take the hashing code used for Deadwood's cache, and adapt it to be usable for the simpler cache used for
upstream_servers and other dictionary variables:
- This is a variable sized dictionary, not a fixed-sized cache. This in mind, I need to add the ability to grow the dictionary as more elements are added to it, and not use any code that removes elements as the cache fills up.
- There is no ability to remove elements from the hash, just add elements
- Hash entries do not expire; once an entry is in the hash, it stays in the hash
The fact of the matter is that I'm hitting the point where I would be better off writing this in C++ instead of just regular C; in C++ I could make a generic hash an abstract class, then add the methods to make the dynamic "dictionary" used for things like
upstream_servers as one derived class, and the methods to remove elements when the cache is full and what not as another different, but similar derived class.
