What is Recycle?

Recycle is a tiny, specialized stack API for retaining and reusing short-lived, reusable objects.

How to use it

Recycle is built around specialized stacks called recyclers. Like stacks, recyclers can push and pop elements. These operations are named free and get respectively. Unlike traditional stacks, recyclers can return elements even if they are empty. Additionally, recyclers use retention policies, which determine how recyclers retain their elements. The API provides default implementations of both recyclers and retention policies, while allowing developers to write their own implementations tailored to their own requirements if needed.

The general use-case would be to obtain a recycler from the Recyclers factory, then obtain elements with get (pop them from the stack) and recycle them with free when they are no longer used (push them back onto the stack). The code example below shows this scenario in Java code.

Example

A short code example of how to use the API:

// create Recycler
Recycler<Point> recycler = Recyclers.createLinear(Point.class, Point::new);

// get a potentially recycled Point object
Point point = recycler.get();

// do something with point here
point.x = 10;
methodUsingPoint(point);

// recycle point object so it can be reused
recycler.free(point);