Motivation
There's currently no way to determine whether an arbitrary ByteBuf
behaves internally like a "singluar" buffer or a composite one, and this
can be important to know when making decisions about how to manipulate
it in an efficient way.
An example of this is the ByteBuf#discardReadBytes() method which
increases the writable bytes for a contiguous buffer (by readerIndex)
but does not for a composite one.
Unfortunately !(buf instanceof CompositeByteBuf) is not reliable, since
for example this will be true in the case of a sliced CompositeByteBuf
or some third-party composite implementation.
isContiguous was chosen over isComposite since we want to assume "not
contiguous" in the unknown/default case - the doc will it clear that
false does not imply composite.
Modifications
- Add ByteBuf#isContiguous() which returns true by default
- Override the "concrete" ByteBuf impls to return true and ensure
wrapped/derived impls delegate it appropriately
- Include some basic unit tests
Result
Better assumptions/decisions possible when manipulating arbitrary
ByteBufs, for example when combining/cumulating them.
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