cw_pack_calculate_size function would be nice

[clwi]

cw_pack_calculate_size function would be nice

[clwi]

Thank you for your interest in CWPack.

Your proposal is, although very appealing, not possible to implement because one of the features in MessagePack is that as little space as possible is used. E.g. an integer can occupy anything from 1 to 9 bytes depending on the integer.

Instead I would recommend you to look at dynamic_memory_pack_context defined in goodies/basic-contexts/basic-contexts.h which is especially created to handle this problem.

/Claes

[mczarnek]

Thanks Claes. That's a reasonable way to handle it. Personally would be happy if there was such a function that popped out the max size that the Message Pack might be, so that way only one malloc is needed, which is likely higher performance. But as currently, once built, you can determine how large it is. I also suppose this is one reason passing in a struct to compress is nice, behind the scenes you could calculate exactly how much is needed, allocate it then pack it.

Still very useful if memory is cheaper short term than it is once you need to use it, which it typically is. MessagePack is very valuable for storage or networking, but short term.. I'm fine allocating a few extra bytes and value performance.