Remove Cstruct: one step forward?

[pierre.alain@xxxxxxx]

Dear all,

Over the past few months, a large amount of work has been carried out to reduce 
the use of Cstruct.t. This was mainly driven by performances, as there were a 
lot of expensive allocations for small buffers (from 0 to a couple of bytes). 
Indeed, there were big performance improvements with mirage-crypto (which 
weren't limited to extracting Cstruct, but also algorithm improvements and a 
deeper thinking about allocations, like allocating a buffer once, and writing 
to it rather than allocating multiple buffers and concatenating them).

Now I'm wondering if this could be a time to extend this work of Cstruct 
removal with another API breakage. You can see at 
https://github.com/mirage/mirage-net/pull/25 a proposal for the new API. It's 
still conservative in term of "where each buffers would be allocated". Of 
course, if it is merged, there will be the need for lot of PR to make dependent 
libraries compliant with the new interface.

That's why I'm happy to ask your opinion on this possible step forward :)
Best,
Pierre

--
P.